Of Isolation
by nomashawn
Summary: Years of captivity and testing in Aperture have left Chell ill-equipped for life anywhere else. She isn't sure how to socialize or get what she needs. Yet true to her tenacity, Chell refuses to give up on figuring out life on the surface. / Rated M mostly for swearing, but there will be violence, mention of sex, and non-sexual nudity. There will be more chapters.
1. Release

" _We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."_

 **-Tom Stoppard,** _ **Rosenc**_ _ **rantz and Guildenstern are Dead**_

ººººº

There just had to be one final joke between them, however unfunny it was. The lift stopped and a line of turrets scanned over her chest. Chell grit her teeth and tensed, flung herself against the back of the lift; twenty ways to evade the situation came into her head but she refused to act on them. The harmless little things weren't shooting at all. The one farthest right was the only one to extended its wings, but no bullets shot from them. They twisted up and down as if considering the situation and the woman before it. Chell tilted her chin down and stared at that turret the hardest, not necessarily threatening it so much as demanding that it make a decision soon. Was she going to have to kill it or not?

Apparently not. Starting with that furthest-right one, they shut off their beams - something Chell didn't think that turrets could do - and the furthest right continued to bob while the others took on the role of a radio.

Chell's shoulders rose and her head gave an unconscious, curious tilt. Doing in Aperture what was not designed of you was a death sentence. She had witnessed singing turrets in the past, but they were hidden under grating, peaceful, and appearing as defective refugees of the Redemption Lines. She had respected them for it, too.

After not long at all, their song and the reasons behind it became boring. Hearing new songs was always wonderful - there were very few that she could remember ever hearing, including the radio and the one her Painter friend had left behind - but this one's "new thing" novelty wore off quickly. It was too repetitive to hold her attention for long.

She could only conclude that this was part of the joke. GLaDOS's last laugh wasn't " _You thought you were going to die,"_ but rather, " _You have to sit here and listen to an entire musical number before you can leave."_

This drew a sigh from Chell that came mostly through her nose. The sigh was voiceless, of course; she hadn't been able to produce vocal sound in decades. Her voice had been removed when she was a very small child. What age she was exactly couldn't be remembered but she had a foggy image of white coats and something plastic held over her mouth and nose. No specific face could be blamed. No one could claim fault but the very facility she was waiting to hurry up and abandon.

Finally, the lift rose again. With shocking inertia. Almost as if GLaDOS were getting annoyed by Her own joke or was perhaps anxious to get one of Her phobias out of the facility. When one has a venomous spider in a jar, one doesn't hesitate to throw it out the front door.

Not that Chell knew what a spider was.

The lift slowed again and Chell held back a sneer. Maybe She wasn't so much rushing to remove Chell from the facility as She was anxious to get to the next part of Her hilariously extended goodbye. If only there were actually any humor in the situation; agreeing to enter an elevator again after _last time_ was in and of itself a sacrifice. One worthy of its reward, but a grating and worrisome one. The presence of glass and the closeness of the walls made her sweat harder than running ever could. Chell spent less time keeping an eye on the turrets and more looking up at where she was _supposed_ to be going. As if GLaDOS could see her exhaustion with this less-than-welcome prank, which Chell fully believed that She could.

Singing - human-like singing, not the coos and purrs of turrets - caught her off-guard. More than that, the language being sung. Chell had knowledge of languages beyond English, but they were limited by the culture that she had grown up surrounded by: Binary, Data Exchange, Morse Code, and the like. They were used around her frequently, but this was new.

It wasn't like GLaDOS to make a fool of Herself, even to laugh at the ignorance of others. She wouldn't sing gibberish. Waste Her vocals on an enemy without a hidden meaning? Never. This was probably some kind of secret message. Chell attempted to decode it with GLaDOS's previous behavior as a translation key. The message she assumed it to be wound up a longer and much less vulgar way of saying "Fuck off."

The song continued long after her view of the turrets was cut. She wasn't exactly making an effort to continue looking at them. Suddenly the lift was faster, which Chell only noticed when she realized that things in her line of vision went by quicker. She had long since lost the ability to feel spatial movement. It hadn't been taken with her voice; rather, she was somewhere in her teen years when stepping through an emancipation grill caused her ears to leak. Chell was less astutely aware of this fault than she was of her voice. She believed that falling felt like floating because she was used to it after so many years. Her eyes and ears and the autobalance in her Long Fall boots were enough to tell her when she or the ground were moving.

Ascension stopped. Chell had hardly a moment to connect the still image before her to a lack of movement before the door swung open. Pure whiteness burnt Chell's eyes but shutting them was not an option. Rather, she leaned her head away, chin diagonally raised. Her unblinking eyes were wide and her pupils didn't know how far to constrict.

The horizon didn't seem real. She wasn't sure what she expected it to be. Her only real memory of Outside was a three-second glimpse of a burning parking lot before she fell unconscious. A good decade had passed since then for all the world except for her own biological form. Cryosleep was hardly a miracle but she appreciated the lack of aging this time around.

Chell did not tread lightly. She kept herself from running under the lie that she was being cautious, but that had already been cast to the wind. Her strides were long and quick and she wasn't about to waste precious time surveying for danger.

So many unfamiliar idle sounds hit her ears. She had never heard her footsteps sound so light before, even with the springing of her boots' braces muffled behind her. The chirps of birds were recognized for what they were: her allies, fellow machine-haters, singing a _much more welcome_ song than any computer could produce.

Sheer white and gold expanded into a shade of powdered blue that could not be found in Aperture and each individual blade of wheat swayed in the wind to its own rhythm, heeding not to the sync of its kin. Large puffy things hovered gracefully in the air, bottom sides flattened. Her gaze raised from the horizon up to them; how did they stay there? Were they as soft as they looked? Chell bet that she could reach one if she jumped high enough.

What sounded like an explosion had her whipped around faster than she could register noise, the part of her brain built to hear violence and retaliate faster than the part of her distracted by wanting to hug clouds. Chell settled when it turned out to just be the door slamming shut. How characteristic of the sore loser that GLaDOS was to throw in one final "And stay out!" to mark the occasion. Nothing could have been a better last word between them.

That is, until the shed opened again.

An old friend came tumbling out. Charred and covered in soot but not a dent in sight. Chell blinked for the first time in several minutes. No wonder they had so many of these things if they were fireproof. She lifted an eyebrow towards the door as it slammed shut again. Less hasty this time; Chell caught it lingering open for just a moment. Long enough for her to question how GLaDOS was taking this. Not that she cared.

Attention returned to the cube. Truth be told, Chell had little affection for it as anything other than a tool. Test Chamber 17 was a psychological examination of an isolated subject's ability to become attached to an inanimate object and subsequently murder it. Part of protocol was to tell every subject who incinerated their cube that they were the fastest on record to do so. Chell's rush through 17 had been the only time that GLaDOS was thankful for the Morality Core's forced regulation of Her tone; despite all scripts provided, Chell truly held the record for fastest solver of Test Chamber 17. Little did Chell know that her nemesis had sources to back up Her taunting claims of sociopathy.

However, the cube's return _was_ appreciated. Test Chamber 17 had been a lie, as were most of GLaDOS's interactions. Not entirely unexpected. Chell nearly smacked herself for not having predicted her cube's survival. Having this as a gift was a sort of "no hard feelings" to go alongside the diplomatic gesture it presented.

They now had an agreement. The cube was the final signature on their peace treaty. She and GLaDOS had _territory_. Aperture was GLaDOS's. The surface was Chell's. Anything from the stratosphere on up was too tainted to claim. The incinerators were GLaDOS's to kill with. The cube was Chell's to keep.

The moon was forsaken land. Banned. Tarnished.

As appreciated as the message was, the messenger would have to be left behind. Chell couldn't bear the sight of the familiar; silver and white and straight, even lines under beautiful layers of caked-on ashes were too much. The cube could hold her no longer. Chell spun around and stared straight above herself, into infinity, into space. Beyond space. Then into the horizon. Beyond the horizon. To the roundness of the Earth. Chell became excited by the nausea that gathered in the pit of her stomach when she attempted to picture _forever._ An incalculable concept, unduplicatable by any written number, now sprawled before her and tangible.

Her feet were moving before she intended them to. The sensation of wheat rustling against skin did not occur, any contact blocked by her thick metal boots. Everything else was foreign enough. Wind, soft dirt, a distinct lack of electrical hum that made the world seem deaf underneath the chittering of birds. The smell of hot, crisp, untainted, non-recycled oxygen burning her nostrils and confusing her lungs. Heat itself, scalding skin paled by decades without sunlight. She remembered the lick of flame in Test Chamber 19 and the hot pavement after killing GLaDOS. Neither were so comforting as this, an embrace from the sun's rays.

Chell hadn't had a thing to drink nor eat in _technically_ ten years. Minus cryosleep, it had only been about a week. That wasn't long in Aperture with plenty of artificial nutrients pumped into the air supply, but with her mouth open to taste how fresh the Outside oxygen was, she realized how thirsty she had become. Feeling dry was normal. She didn't know how much her body relied on Aperture's support. She could find water later, after frolicking was over.

Gravity Challenge braces were designed to protect the wearer from falls and keep them standing. Long Fall boots were a much more impressive upgrade; they were designed not only to absorb the shock of a fall and balance while landed like the braces before them, but to balance and weigh the wearer midair as well. Any schlub could do a backflip 20 yards above the ground and land squarely on their feet as long as they were wearing a pair of these. It was thanks to Long Fall boots (and the braces) that Chell was able to stand at all, which she was sorely unaware of.

Despite ignorance regarding her own sense of balance (or lack thereof), maneuvering in Long Fall boots was second nature to her. Anybody else would have had a hard time dropping down against the artificial gravity provided, yet Chell knew just the right way to buckle her knees, where to lean and when, in order to find herself on the ground.

Chell rubbed her cheek into the dirt and kicked, stretched out like a cat in a meadow, and did not rest. She was out of her comfortable position the second that she had found it, smacking the soft ground to roll over and over. Then stop on her belly, push herself into sitting, fall on her back and stare up at infinity. Repeat the process a few more times with a little variation for spice. Stand up, fall down, roll over. Sit up, lay down, sit up, roll over. Pause, roll over. Sit up, stand up, run in a circle. Sit down. Lay down. Roll over.

She stopped on her back, knees up, arms by her sides, chest heaving and nose aflame with panting. Her cheeks and lungs were in the best kind of pain. Chell wasn't used to smiling.

The gentle breeze wafted over her, tilted the wheat stalks, caressed her bangs away from her forehead. The clouds were pink and embossed with twilight upon them. Chell had seen clouds during her three-second post-murder glimpse of the Outside, but not when firing herself into space. That was because, she was proud of herself for figuring out, sometimes the sky gets Dark. Then time will pass, and it will be Light again. The clouds must go somewhere at Dark to hide. She was curious where the clouds went at Dark and watched them.

Her breaths didn't quite even out but they settled down to normal. Chell became so enraptured by the way pink transformed into orange and then scarlet and purple and navy blue, and the stars poked their way through the cosmos, that she lost track of the clouds. She was disappointed to see that they had hidden when she wasn't looking, a tiny pang of worry coming over her that went unnoticed. There was little to be worried about; nothing could block her view of the sky. Days were countable now. She had plenty of time to hunt down the clouds later.

Sleep didn't dare approach her. One of the many chemicals forced through her system in excess by Aperture's very air was adrenaline. It coursed through her. She didn't recognize its constant overdose as anything out of the ordinary. Excluding the moon, this was her first night. With adrenaline beating down melatonin - the chemical that makes diurnal animals tired in darkness - Chell had no indication whatsoever that Darktime was Sleeptime. This was just a blue-er, shadowy-er version of day.

The moon lingered above her head. It was one notch from full. Her smile vanished but the ache in her cheeks remained. Her nose scrunched up. Her lips parted to bare teeth. What started as a snarl was turned right around when she tried to lean away; with the ground against her back and her wrists exposed as her sides, Chell felt more pinned than threatening. The overwhelming sensation of being _trapped_ wasn't limited to legitimate restraint and Chell became for all of one second convinced that she couldn't move, that the moon and the moron residing there had her hands and ankles bound.

Upon realizing how absurd that was, she ripped herself from the dirt and ran. In circles, mostly, and figure-eights, and ridiculous, un-nameable shapes. Glaring up at the moon when she got the chance. Snarling at it. Clenching her fists at it. Smiling through bare-toothed growls and snorting through her nose like a bull. She frolicked in very decisive, very intentional defiance.

The sun was rising again before she was finished spitting contempt. The clouds came back with it, fluffier and more huggable than anything else she had ever seen. Chell backed up a running start and made a short dash under one, then sprung and coiled her knees. Her jump was impressive, aided only partially by the boots; she could reach a height easily rounded to one foot, though was in truth a few centimeters short. Yet that wasn't high enough to reach the clouds. She huffed and tried again; picked a smaller cloud, sprinted, leapt, swiped her arms and claws far above her head. Landed without a touch. They were too high to reach.

Chell scanned her surroundings. The shed and cube were invisible now, somewhere in some direction. All around her was an endless sea of gold as if the whole of the Earth was overgrown with wheat. Another scan gave her better results: on the bare tip of the horizon, some mound of silhouettes akin to a mirage. Gorgeously uneven and scattered. She bounded towards them and the end of the field.

The wheat stopped abruptly near two miles out. It cut off in a straight line and sunk into the earth. For once, her eyes fell on the ground. On the scattered pebbles and disorganized twigs. On math-less patterns that Aperture did not allow to exist. On the natural placement of things that Aperture would rather tidy up.

Attention then lifted to the massive pillars of wood that towered over her. They, too, were dazzling; their branches intertwined and grew uninhibited. Their leaves were sparse in places and abundant in others. They were the bigger, better, _stronger_ version of the vines that she had taken such pleasure in while still in Aperture's belly. Crawling around the corpse of a massive mechanical animal and admiring the moss in its organs, the bugs and birds eating its metal carrion. The organic stench of rot, now replaced with the smell of dew and saplings.

Chell had no doubt that these things were alive, just like the walls of Aperture. She wondered who built them and how they were made, and why there were so many. If she could talk to them like cores to lesser computers or nanobots. The easy answer was No, and she chose a more practical use for them: climbing.

Their unevenly dented bark and non-uniform structure made them easy get a grip on. Chell dug her uncut nails into the tree's thick hide and her boots' metal braces dug deep lacerations. Once in the branches, her boots held her steady. She wasn't expecting leaves to sting but a few of the more firm ones poked her as she went up. She gave them the benefit of the doubt that this was entirely accidental and kept going without giving the tree a violent trim.

Her head poked through the top layer of leaves and instantly tilted back to check that the clouds hadn't drifted too far. They hadn't. Chell pushed the rest of herself up, balancing on two thin branch tips made easy by the design of her boots. She took in a breath, then shot her hand into the air. A low huff, nose scrunching. She was still too close to the ground.

Chell jumped down. As thick as the trees were, as tightly interwoven as they had grown, she didn't feel trapped amongst them. The sky was visible through bundles of pretty leaves and she had plenty of room to squeeze between their trunks. Clearings were aplenty. Her romp through Outside's wilds had to slow to a tranquil hike. She swerved and curled around foliage, pet bushes like they were animals, rubbed her cheek against the trees to pick up their muddy, oaky scent. It didn't work; the chemical stench clinging to her wouldn't go away. She had forgotten that it was there. The animals didn't. She had yet to see a single one; they all hid from the overpowering reek of chlorine and ketone and the stomping sound of braces against dirt.

What eventually halted her trek was a very thick dirt road. Even straight lines Outside could not compare to Aperture's; the path's edges were shakily carved and run over with dents. There were skid lines, dark, light. Pebbles covered the whole surface. Chell spent quite some time studying it. She concluded that it had to lead somewhere and the remaining time was wasted on trying to decipher _where_ as if coordinates were coded into the pattern of the pebbles. So as not to disturb the imprecise, she tread alongside it with her eyes - unblinking - firmly on the ground.

There came a rumbling sound. Chell's vision began to vibrate. Running on instinct, she leapt away from the noise, and away from the road, until her back smacked painfully against a tree. Her fingertips dug into bark, eyes wide as a machine zipped past her.


	2. Human Flesh

" _The world is always changing brightness and hotness and soundness, I never know how it's going to be the next minute."_

\- **Emma Donoghue,** _ **Room**_

ººººº

 _AI._ Her chest heaved and her hair stood on end. She hadn't been even close to assuming that robots wouldn't exist out here, but she hadn't expected them to be so fast. That one had hardly been sneaky, but she had to stay alert. One could creep up on her in the future.

Underneath fear, her curiosity once again sparked. Chell made a mental note to find and kill one of these new AI, not only to prevent it from being dangerous but to take it apart and find out how they moved so fast; she had barely been able to tell window from wheel of the one that had passed her by.

Contemplating whether or not this counted as "against better judgement," she continued to follow the road. It had to lead _somewhere._ Nothing would travel along it so fast with no end goal in mind. Despite all cravings for freedom and disorder, Chell clung to the only available directive. All she could do now was brace for the possibility of winding up surrounded by AI.

If push came to shove, murder was mandatory. If push stayed push, murder was still a viable option. An option that she admittedly had already begun planning.

Trees became sparser and sparser the further she walked and the thick, jade grass became thinner, brighter, and patchier until it finally gave way to dirt. The path, in turn, became unwelcome black cement painted with strokes of yellow down the center. Some steps later and the rest of the dirt had been tiled over in unpainted, gray cement. Chell scrunched her nose at the sight and prepared to see white metal walls upon looking up.

Her heart skipped a beat. Lifting attention from the ground brought into view just about the last of what she had been expecting: civilization the likes of which had never been seen.

The concept of construction - rooms, it seemed, separate from each other with no connection to any ceiling or overarching, singular wall formation - was limited to the sickening familiarity of the little glass box that she had spent the majority of her life trapped inside. The shed was the first comparison to come to her mind, which she had originally written off as another mistake of Aperture's.

These structures baffled her. Each was its own standing compartment. Individual chambers, above ground, and connected nothing. Despite having full knowledge that the sky was just above, visual conditioning via having grown up indoors told her that if she were to glance upward, the sky would be a common ceiling and that this whole "Outside" business was just a hallway. Yet their pointed roofs and the clear lack of an end above her defied this most basic of logics.

Two quick peeks between the trees behind her and the houses in front were enough to calculate the height of the closest roofs. She would hug a cloud one of these days whether it liked it or not.

Movement caught her attention and sent it zipping to the source: several humans were in the distance doing a plethora of things, the main action of Chell's interest being that of _existing at all._ She bounded for the nearest one - a woman in too much clothing for the late August heat - and snatched her into a tight hug from behind before the woman even had a chance to ask what that metal springing sound was.

She yelped and struggled. Chell only smiled and squeezed her with all the innocence of a large child, intending no harm. The woman's movements were not fully recognized for what they were. Why _would_ she be struggling when all that was happening was a friendly embrace?

The woman's startled - and later, terrified - shouts drew the attention of a few others on the block. About the time they all looked over at her, Chell had already let go and spun her around. The smile on Chell's face could only have been described as unsettling given the sudden assault despite it being all-around naive in every other sense; the woman - shaking and her mouth hanging open - figured out quickly enough from the dull, innocuous childishness in Chell's eyes that harm had not been an intention. What she could possibly have wanted, however, was lost on her.

"Uh…" She peered over at the second-closest person, a man watering his lawn, who had stopped staring at the two the moment that he realized one of them was looking. His whistling was conspicuous at best but not well-heard from a distance. Chell's sensitive hearing picked up on the sound easily but didn't connect it to the man's lips, instead assuming that it was mere birdsong.

The woman's still-horrified face turned to her other side, where most of the others disturbed by her outcry had already set about continuing their days. One or two hidden behind the glass of across-the-street windows, however, were staring with their blinds half-drawn and phones at the ready in case this confrontation got violent. Finally, her attention returned to Chell, who had yet to decipher what wide eyes, a trembling jaw, and general leaning away meant.

Eventually, she picked up on the woman's frown. Her grip on the woman's forearms eased up as did her smile. Her eyebrows raised in an intentional show of concern and she let one arm go to raise a hand to the woman's face, used two fingers on either side of her lips to force a smile. Chell then tilted her head to indicate a sense of confusion, which boiled down to the mute version of a question mark. Her fingers twitched with their first contact against another human's flesh.

The woman merely whimpered and leaned even further away. She was dangerously close to losing balance and landing on her rear but Chell's grip on her forearm assured that she wouldn't be moving anytime soon.

It was then that Chell translated the woman's shaking. She had noticed vibrations underneath her palms but hadn't considered that the other's emotions could differ from the obvious - which was of course Chell's own interpretation of their meeting. Happy. Excited. What reason was there to be anything else? Were they not celebrating freedom and socialization amongst fellow human beings?

No, apparently one of them wasn't. Chell lost her smile for all of three seconds before it appeared again; smaller, softer, and her eyebrows stayed raised. She gathered spit in the back of her throat and balled it on the back of her tongue. Running air through said ball made a rumbling noise, much like how vocal chords work. To run an uneven amount of air through a larger saliva-ball with an expression of anger was to growl, but here she only had a little saliva-ball and her breaths were calm and regular. Essentially, Chell was purring.

In Aperture, she had used the sound as a form of self-soothing after particularly stressful tests. At first there had been merely pride at the ability to produce noise, but soon the of use spit-sounds as a relaxation technique became all too apparent. It stuck as a habit of hers due to its efficiency and usefulness - as all methods in Aperture - but she thought of it as being clever.

If purring could keep her sane for a couple decades in Aperture, maybe it could sooth the woman whose arm she still held onto with the grip of a bear trap. The woman made an effort to stop looking so mortified, though it wasn't so much the rhythmic spit-gargling coming from her assaulter as much as it was a desire to stop looking like a victim to passers-by when nothing bad was actively happening.

That didn't stop Chell from that thinking she had been helpful.

Once the woman stopped vibrating, Chell stopped purring and let go of her. She had less than a second to contemplate what the hell to even say before Chell's hands were smushing her cheeks together. The woman's lips were dolled in a shade of red rivalling that of wildflowers and Chell much appreciated the color. She liked the girl's clothing, too, and her curly hair. Chell's hands left her cheeks long enough to reach around and bounce her hair a couple of times, that far-too-ignorant smile returned to her expression. She toyed with jewelry and scratched her sleeves, ruffled her hair, booped her nose, and so on.

With each passing inquisitive poke and prod, the woman dove another step down from Terrified and into Frustrated. Features previously widened in horror squished down to squint at Chell through disapproving eyes. As before, the change went unexamined; Chell was feeling playful and assumed that this carried through to her new friend. The man watering his lawn had decided to go inside of his house and pretend that none of this was happening.

The woman's hands raised and began the frantic process of trying to predict where Chell's would go next to grab them. "Okay, okay stop, okay _stop_ now."

She was only able to get a grip on Chell when Chell deliberately moved them with the intention of being caught. Though rather than holding her by the wrists as planned, the woman found herself holding Chell's hands in a more colloquial sense: with their fingers intertwined and palms pressed together. They looked like star-crossed lovers meeting at the border of their war-torn homes, except one of them was a little too excited about it and the other wanted nothing more than to break up.

Finally, Chell began to analyze the woman's expression: she was not pleased. Purring didn't work this time. Anger had regained the woman's confidence and she huffed as she separated their hands, stepped around Chell, and stomped the rest of the way to her destination.

Chell, for the life of her, had no idea what had just transpired. The woman had been happy, then scared, then relaxed, then annoyed? The reasons behind her mood swings had been a complete mystery, outside of relaxation having something to do with purring, probably.

The encounter hadn't been a failure by any means, though. Chell rubbed her palms over her cheeks as if the sensation of foreign human flesh could stick to one surface and be transferred to another. She was still tingling from contact, from the woman's heat and the feeling of subtle pulse, breath, _life_ underneath the fabric of her shirt.

She continued down the sidewalk with a careful eye out for more companions, but the streets had mostly vacated by then. Nobody wanted to be outdoors with a serial hugger on the loose.

One block or so away, nobody around had witnessed Chell's first encounter and were oblivious to the odd woman meandering through. All except for one individual whose size and general stature made him hardly a reliable source for what to and what not to avoid: a tiny dog.

Some white rag-furred rat on a pink leash began yelping his tiny ass off at the disgusting, impure scent of laboratory chemicals. His little black nose twitched every couple of high-pitched, fire-alarm yelps. His exasperated owner chuckled nervously and, hand over her heart, flashed an apologetic smile to Chell. She had half of the letter "S" sounded out of an apology before she noticed that Chell had her teeth bared.

The spit still gathered on the back of Chell's tongue was not put to waste; she hunched her shoulders, balled her fists, and snarled at the little dog. He bounced and leapt side to side. More movement meant more danger; Chell distanced her feet from each other for a sturdy fighting stance, quite literally seconds away from snapping the dog in half and calling it "self-defense." No matter how small a thing was, it could very well prove to be a formidable enemy. The turrets were not the only ones who were responsible for this lesson.

The owner took her sweet time gathering bravery. Then dared getting close enough to the snarling lady to swipe her dog off the ground. Like the woman before her, she gave Chell a wide berth as she stepped around her and continued on. Chell hoped that she would be okay with that fuzzy deathtrap in her arms, but she seemed the have the situation somewhat under control. What with the leash and all.

The dog owner's awkward leave left the inklings of a new concept in Chell's head: _personal space._ She thought back to the first woman she had met and played the memory of their encounter back like a recording. Her photographic memory made this not merely an easy feat, but an everyday one. She had no reason to assume that hers _wasn't_ the standard for all human memory systems.

Upon looking back, the woman had first shown fear upon being grabbed. The purring had calmed her (so she assumed), but she got angry when touching started. Then the dog owner had expressed a lack of desire to interact by avoiding not only Chell, but the immediate space around her.

How strange. What wasn't to like about being touched? She didn't understand, but alright; if that was the key to Outside interaction, she would learn it. Touch must henceforth be permission-only...with the sneaky exception of particularly soft clothing. Chell refused to stop bothering people wearing anything puffy. Lucky for the townspeople, it was summer, and few had the motivation to deck their outfits in fur under such hot weather.

Eventually the question came up of where they were getting all these clothes. Chell had yet to see a single outfit identical to another, which, while an exciting concept, made her rather jealous. Her run-down jumpsuit and old sweat-stained tank top bore logos of a place best left to ashes and rubble and nightmares. Though her boots would have to stay - one never knew when one may need to climb something tall, say, to hug a cloud - and so would the bandage around her right wrist. She had been knocked unconscious with a scratch in her arm and woke up with a bandage around it. There was only one person who could have left it and she, unable to pick up and carry murals out of Aperture with her, wanted to keep at least _one_ gift from her mysterious friend.

The notion of him being dead somewhere in Aperture never occurred to her. The mysterious were, for all intents and purposes, immortal.

Just about every house was accompanied by one of those machines. Chell bared her teeth at them as she passed. Soon enough, as the streets widened, AI started appearing right next to her as well. They appeared offline. Sleep mode. That didn't stop her from growling at one in warning as she approached it and hesitantly ran her fingers over its windshield.

Glass. She hated glass. She hated small spaces, too, and loathed seeing what she could only conclude were _chairs_ built into the car which proved that humans were supposed to be inside of it. As morning became noon, more and more of these things zipped by on the streets much slower than the one on the dirt road had. They came in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and colors (which she hesitantly admitted to liking), but all those mobile contained at least one human. Her conclusion remained that these were transport AI who were programmed to stay on the black pavement. Like a management rail. She wondered if their tires were magnetic, because she didn't see any poles connecting them to the ground.

As long as the humans within them consented to being given rides, she wouldn't destroy any non-violent cars. However, whichever one tried to get _her_ inside of it would meet a very swift and violent end.

The sidewalk stopped. It continued a couple of feet away, past a section of black street-pavement. Transport AI turned there and kept going. It wasn't safe to cross. Chell supposed that punching any oncoming cars was an option, but the large distracting pole across the walkway seemed more promising. It had three big, round lights of different colors and the image of an almost-red hand on a primitive screen made up of tinier lights. The only lit of the big lights was green. Chell immediately began deciphering, but stopped herself when she heard footsteps behind her. Sensitivity to being crept up on turned within seconds into an exaggerated act of politeness as she side-stepped to make room for the couple who now shared her predicament. She smiled at them and they merely smiled back, dashing her hopes that respecting their boundaries would end in grateful cuddling.

She returned to examining the pole. The light had changed to yellow when she wasn't looking. She tisked, and seconds later, it was red and the hand had changed to a white stick figure. She blinked, raised an eyebrow. The humans next to her unceremoniously crossed the street. Had they done something to change the light? Was there a sensor, a button? This had to be activated somehow; it was a challenge, permission to cross being a reward to some kind of action. Nothing made more sense than trial and reward.

A countdown started, so she hurried up and ran across the street. No doubt she would cross more of these have them figured out very, very soon.

Elsewise, punching cars was still an option.


	3. Silver

" _And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."_ **  
\- F. Scott Fitzgerald,** _ **The Great Gatsby**_

ººººº

The slated wood and wide-set, big-lawned style of houses began to diminish. They were replaced with awnings and signs that she was yet unable to read. The doors went from wood to glass. Cars now slept in packs when not roaming along their management path. She still hissed at them as they went by, but more as a precautionary action. They may not have been able to leave the road but she'd be damned if they didn't know to avoid her when she was crossing it.

When the transition from residential to commercial became blatantly obvious, Chell started to miss grass. She had hastily decided that green was one of her new favorite colors and that the few scraps of it on signs and clothing weren't enough. Not even many of the cars were green.

Naturally, her search for nature had her piqued by the sight of a park, the only open expanse of land since the field though not nearly as vast.

The edge of the grass closest to the sidewalk had a few cement benches. To her left-hand side (when she faced the park) was a mix of field and forest, a long range of short grass and thin trees. On the right was pure grassland with a sandpit full of plastic climbing equipment, swing sets, tubes. All brightly colored and all teeming with cute children having the time of their life. The smaller, more comfortable-looking benches around the play structure, too, were swarming with humans. Larger ones, adults, keeping hawk-like eyes on their kids.

Chell darted towards the structure as soon as she had counted the amount of humans; the seventeen that crowded this one small piece of Outside was already more than she had been expecting to interact with in total. Even having four friends would have been a miracle. And the children, they were _adorable._

Her boots shredded the grass as she ran. Their weight and shock-absorbing structure hindered her speed greatly. Fortunately for the parents and unsuspecting, fragile children, Chell remembered her lesson on personal space. Her first action was not to hug one of the kids like she wanted to, but rather to leap up onto the closest ladder and step the rest of the way onto the highest platform.

The kids on top of it stopped playing with foam swords when they saw her. One of them ran off and the other gave chase, mild concern quickly turning into an impromptu game of tag. Chell chased after them both until they went down the slide; the edges were built for small bodies and the miniature six-inch-long ceilinged hallway leading to it was an absolute no-go.

She chased them around from on top instead, following them around the borders of the platform. A few other kids ran up and past her. They ignored her and she gave them plenty of space while quietly hoping that at least one would ask her to pick them up.

The parents, of course, kept an eye on her. Some of them assumed that one of the kids was hers but others saw that she didn't focus on any one kid in particular and became terribly suspicious.

Eventually, the majority of kids stuck to playing in the sand with only one coming up every few minutes for the slide. Chell hoisted herself over the protective fence around the border of the platform and landed heavily in the sand. Now that she wasn't running, just how much the liquid-like the formation of the ground was made her heavy boots sink. The world's slowest, most shallow quicksand.

Her throat made a scratchy rumble, the closest thing to a whine that she could make. A sense of intense fear washed over the moment that it was harder than usual to lift her foot; she felt trapped, surrounded. In Aperture, this forced hesitation would have gotten her killed.

Chell's solution to this predicament was to struggle. It wouldn't have been too hard just to lift one foot at a time and slowly make her way out of the sandpit if not for the rush of adrenaline and paranoid terror. Everything was a threat if she couldn't move out of the way in time. She clumsily tore her feet away from the sand one at a time without knowing quite where to put the other without getting it stuck again. This, combined with an effort to move forward, had her stumbling out of the pit. Sand kicked up by her desperate efforts spilled onto the grass.

She caught her breath, checked that she could move. Some of the parents were staring but her fiasco had brought no harm to the kids, so she was ignored within moments. Chell glanced up at them and then back to the children. Taking her boots off was not an option when climbing was involved - even with short surfaces - so she let them be for the time being. She abandoned the play structure with a last few terrified pants and the wary eyes of parents watching her go.

Disappointment faded with reasonable speed. The rest of the park was astounding on its own, human friends or no human friends. The trees' branches were too thin for an adult to climb but started low enough to stand in the middle of branching trunks, like on the belly of an upside-down octopus. Their bark was lighter and closer to snakeskin than chunks of wood.

These trees were far more scattered than in the forest, but there was a section near the back where five of them made a rounded line around the corner of the field. They weren't there to block or hide anything and wouldn't have been able to anyway; the clearing behind them was open and up against the wall of a building as well as the end of a short fence. It cut off less than halfway into making the little clearing a closed-off space, not _quite_ enough room for a small car to drive through.

She stepped into the clearing and looked over it. Several cars slept peacefully on the other side. Another one of their communal resting places. She sighed and bared her teeth at one but doubted that any of them could see it while offline. She couldn't see many that were moving, the closest road out in the distance and mostly blocked by the massive brick building at her side. A car entered while she was watching but it kept its distance, settled to a halt on the other side of the lot. As it should. She snorted at it and left the clearing.

In fact, she left the park completely. Having a photographic memory made it unlikely for Chell to get lost. Not only was every landmark catalogued, but every recorded turn could easily be rewound and re-traced. There was no reason for her not to follow people around at random, which is exactly what she did. None of them had time to get suspicious as she changed whenever somebody new interested her, which was just about every other person she saw.

Several blocks away from the park, she exhaled and stopped, leaned against a wall and watched people go by. Her nose scrunched and teeth bared at passing cars. Chell had begun to grow frustrated from a lack of attention. From a lack of affection and friendship. It shouldn't be so hard to get hugs. She slid down the wall and sat on the sidewalk, admiring the people and jealous of them. Wondering how to earn their companionship like one earns cake from a test chamber.

One person in particular caught her eye. Namely, the one approaching her. Chell shot to her feet in a matter of heart beats, a startled gasp coming through. Her first instinct was to defend against would-be attackers but above that was the hope that this person would hug her.

He didn't, but he held out his fisted hand. Chell flinched despite his movements having been slow and nowhere near close enough to land a punch. She tilted her head and failed to notice him already biting his lip and tapping his foot, looking around, waiting for her to realize that he wanted to drop something into her palm. At a loss for what to do, she grabbed his hand. He sighed, realized she wasn't going to get it, and pulled her hand off of his manually. Held her by the wrist palm-side-up and dropped several shiny discs in.

Then wished a hasty "Good day" and abandoned the scene.

Chell looked at the gifts. Four little silver circles. Three with one image and one with another, she thought until she flipped over the forth and it turned out they were identical. Chell tilted her head with her nose scrunched up, one eyebrow raised quite high. What were these things? Why would he give them to her? She ran her fingers over one, felt the bumpy image ingrained in it and the wavy edges of the sides.

Could she eat them? Sticking one in her mouth answered that question. No. No, she couldn't. Chell spit out the coin and licked her arm to get the taste off, happier with dirt and sweat on her tongue than old coin taste.

Licking her own arm with a dry mouth reminded Chell that she was thirsty. There hadn't been any places to earn water from what she'd seen but this place was so different from Aperture (and so blissfully free of test chambers) that the method was probably obvious, just too unfamiliar for her to see. Chell dropped the coins in her jumpsuit pocket and returned to wandering with her eyes out this time for people holding or drinking water.

None of them were. Eventually she found herself observing some new car-centric place across the street, a square slab of land with a normal building in the back and several small, thin ones in rows in front of it. Though the smaller buildings were machines, not rooms, she doubted that they were as sentient as the cars. She watched a human put his car in sleep mode and get out, press a few buttons, and stick something from the wall-like-machine into the side of his car. Oh, this was probably a charging station.

Chell hesitated to cross the street despite the little white stick figure saying that she could. For two reasons: the first being that she knew from experience how defensive people could be over their fuel, namely herself; food was precious and rare and earned through hard work. She couldn't see car being kind to a strange, independant human known for violence towards AI.

The second reason was that she still wanted to figure out how the crossing lights worked. What made them change from Unsolved to Solved and let her pass. It clicked back to red and the no-crossing hand, and instantly she was scurrying around the edge of the sidewalk in search of a solution. Within moments, she spotted a tiny button against a pole and shoved her thumb onto it. It made a _beep_ -beep noise and she whipped attention to the light, but it didn't change. Not even to yellow. Chell searched around herself for anything else that the button may have changed or added to the environment. Nothing. She looked up at the lights. Yellow.

Was there a delay? Did someone else do something while she wasn't looking again? Chell huffed, frustrated and confused, about to turn her head away when the light turned red and the white walking figure came up.

The snarl on her features stayed as she crossed the street. Who kept solving these puzzles when she wasn't looking? Why couldn't _she_ solve them? Underneath her irritation was a deeply embedded fear: someone here might be better than her. Smarter, faster. _No one_ was allowed to be better than her. Old models get replaced. The obsolete get destroyed.

People leaning away from and generally avoiding Chell as she hissed and growled at their cars went unnoticed. She wasn't threatening them, she was threatening the AI, and so they had no feasible reason to experience fear. Her shoulders were tense and her movements stiff as she criss-crossed through the rows of machines. Constantly checking over her shoulder, leaping at the sound of starting engines and wheels hitting pavement.

The door of the building behind her was by far the most startling, a little dingle-ding sound piercing her focus alongside the slam and footsteps. Chell whisked around with her teeth already bared and ready to fight but the man leaving didn't notice her. Without breaking stride, he unscrewed the cap of his bottle and drank the contents.

Chell's eyes widened. She involuntarily smacked her lips together, her mouth producing a pathetic amount of saliva as if it was saying to her, " _Yeah, we need that. Right now."_

Had he exited from a park or a field, she would've rushed right in and snatched some. Things weren't going to be that easy. They never were.

Chell stalked closer to the building. Head lowered, scoping out the size of the place. It was tiny inside and the door was made of terrifyingly thick glass, but there were two people inside and an entire box full of water bottles. She took in deep breaths, steadied herself. Stood up tall. Chin up. Proud, strong. She ironed out the obvious rage and fear from her expression, made it dull, emotionless. Unreadable. Invulnerable.

Prepared for a fight and gulping down the last of her spit, Chell cautiously pushed the door open with a simultaneous side-step away from the doorway. The bell went off and her attention darted to it, then to the two men inside. Their glance had settled into a stare, somewhat nervous as this filthy person glared them down with the door held open.

Chell crept further inside one inch at a time with her back against the door and her eyes on the ceiling. "Close that," said the human behind the counter, "You're letting all the air out." She hadn't intended the hard stare she gave in response to be a threat - just glancing in his direction in response to unexpected sound - but it shut him up anyway. She took her sweet time getting under the ceiling and even then she stood like a flamingo with her raised foot holding the door open for another two full minutes.

Her foot lowered. She cursed herself for flinching visibly at the sound of the door shutting. Her fists were balled so tight that her knuckles paled and her eyes were locked on the box of water at the back of the room. It wasn't as warm in here. She didn't like that. The man on her side of the counter scooted closer to said counter so that she could walk behind him without getting within stabbing distance and awkwardly attempted to re-start his conversation with the other.

She peered over every so often but much of what they were saying didn't make sense and she didn't really care for any of it. She crouched, grabbed several bottles of water, and began to walk out.

"Hey! Aren't you gonna pay for those?"

Chell stopped. She blinked and turned around. The man behind the desk was struggling to return her glare but the other deeply regretted being in the same room as those words and this woman. He snatched his own bottle off of the counter and threw a plethora of assorted coins from his pocket at the desk, said his brisk goodbyes, and scuttled out of the store with his head down before the coins had even finished bouncing off of the wood.

Small traces of tension released with the door re-opening. It hadn't locked behind her. Still, the tiny _click_ of it shutting again was enough to make her heart skip a couple of beats. She let out one very long, calming breath through her nose. The man behind the counter stopped trying to compete with her blank, heartless scowl.

In truth, she was only curious as to what he meant. Chell had been fully intending to tilt her head in question as soon as she didn't need to listen out for the door anymore, but before she had a chance to, she figured it out. Her eyes only left his face when they trailed down to the coins on the counter. Chell licked her upper lip - a habit of hers when deep in thought - and approached the counter. The man instinctively and regrettably dodged, darted backward, almost knocked himself into the shelves of trinkets against the wall behind him. Again, she responded to the noise but had no reason to attack.

The bottles were set down on the counter as one collective. Then she reached into her pocket without taking her eyes off of him and dropped her coins on the desk. The man chewed his tongue and counted all four of them at least six times in his head before responding. "Ma'am…" he said, "You're gonna need more than this. It's two dollars for a bottle."

She didn't understand. This time, her head-tilt came fast.

He put his palms up. "It's...two dollars, per bottle. For one bottle."

She pointed to the coins. She had four of them; if these were dollars then this should be enough for two bottles.

"No, it's _two_ dollars."

She pointed to the coins harder. If these weren't dollars, then what were? How could she get some? The other human had given him coins, most of them identical to hers, so why didn't these count?

He picked up on none of her questions. "Ma'am, I can't go selling you this much water for such little money… I'd go out of business. Please just pay and leave."

She pointed at her coins _again._ Her nose twitched in annoyance. This room was too small to be dealing with an idiot.

"Okay, I'll give you one for a dollar. But just one."

Chell squinted, licked her lip. Righted her head only to tilt it the other way. He had implied that what she had was one dollar, despite there being four objects on the table. Given that there were other types of coins in her sight, it stood to reason that the particular shape and size of any given circle represented what fraction it stood for.

With that, she figured out that she was paying in fourths, as well as all possible scenarios for how the other coins on the table - with one of her coins equaling one-fourth - fit together into two dollars. The scenario that fit best meant that small coins were one-tenth each and the ones in-between sizes were one-twentieth.

After the ten or so seconds that it took her to put all of this together, the man spoke up again: "Okay! Two. Two for a dollar. I can't give you anything more, I really can't."

She nodded, grabbed two water bottles, and shoved the door open with the force of her entire shoulder. Her threatening facade of bravery left with the sight of the sky, replaced with triumphant smiling and hugging her bottles tightly to her chest. One was dropped so that her hands could both be free to rip off the cap and throw it aside. Water streamed down her cheeks and chin as she threw her head back and chugged the first bottle.

It was empty within moments. She threw it and snatched the other one up, ripped the cap, threw it, drank half of the bottle. The rest was poured over her head and she shook her hair to get it rolling down her skin, soaking her shirt. She poured some on her knees and down her back but most of it was spent on her arms, face, neck, and hair, trying to turn less than six ounces of liquid into a bath.

After the bottle was emptied, she tried to suckle a few last drops from it. She crushed the bottle close to her nose and breathed the air where water once was. She felt sick from too much in her stomach too fast, but she ignored the feeling. She ignored the people watching her, too, while she dropped the bottle and licked spare drops of water from her arms and hands. They tasted like mud.


	4. Fingerpainting

" _Time is making fools of us again._ "  
 **\- J.K. Rowling,** **Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire**

ººººº

 _Aperture was cold. Yet in the seven years since its Queen had fallen, the oxygen ceased its "freshening up" step in the cycle. It came out of the vents musty and slightly warmer. All cold now came not from the need to sustain machine life, but from the sunless-ness of their tomb._

 _From the metal walls. Floors. Ceiling._

 _From the lack of burnable materials. The used-up matches and broken bunsen burners. The worn-out electrical cables that wouldn't overheat outdated computers anymore._

 _From the loneliness. The indescribable loneliness. From the familiar skeletons and names still recognized on security passcards. He felt cold using them._

 _Even the paint was cold._

 _He had taken his last two pills seven years ago with the intention of escaping shortly thereafter. However - a miscalculated explosion, a hitch in the plan… That idea fell apart as easily as anything else. Like this paint. Dripping between his fingers. Hitting the ground hard._

 _The miraculous thing about cryosleep in Aperture's Relaxation Chambers was that the bodies in them weren't truly frozen. They were put into a state of suspension, yes, yet unlike traditional cryo, no ice was used. All it took was the right amount of chemicals to keep a subject stable and unaging. He wondered if she'd notice it - the minute changes in temperature - when she woke up._

 _He'd made it a habit of visiting. At first, to see if he could wake her up. That attempt had ended the same as his plan and the paint. Yet the sight of a scratch on her wrist while he was trying bade him to stay and help, and later, to come back. Wounds wouldn't heal in cryo. She needed him and this was the very least that he could do for putting her in such a state._

 _Most of the time there was nothing to be done. He messed with things, moved a chair, fiddled with a painting, brushed her hair… Felt her pulse on her throat. Reminded himself that she was alive. The only other thing that was. Everything had died with the Queen at the wheel - first from Her murder of the humans, then from the human's murder of Her._

 _He tried very hard not to make a mess of things but seven years into waiting and he really didn't have the energy to wash his hands. The paint had mostly dried by that point, anyway. Mostly._

 _She had long since reached the status of Messiah. He no longer saw her as a human being, a mortal to be concerned for, but rather an angel over whom luxuries should be fussed and paid as tribute. She could only feel the bliss of unconsciousness and the heroism of escape._

 _The stiff bed didn't sink under his weight at all. It had grown too old to cushion those only visiting and too loyal to erase imprints made by time. Chell's imprint would remain embedded in the mattress for decades after her leave._

 _All he knew in those moments were obsessive appreciation for her mere existence and an overwhelming craving for companionship. The top part of her jumpsuit was thoughtlessly unzipped and her arms pulled delicately out of the sleeves. He used only his fingertips to tie them around her waist and then touch her arms. Barely brushing over._

 _His skin tingled and an involuntary yelp caught in his throat, became a sob instead. He moved his hands to the hem of her shirt and slid them under. Only barely touching at first. Yet lost in a trance of warmth and the subtle, almost poetic rhythm of another human being's working pulse, he pressed the rest of his hands down against her flesh. They felt her stomach for a time, brushed up her sides and then over her rib cage. Tangible underneath skin. Separated by muscle but very little else. He whimpered._

 _He lifted a bit to go further up. His palms didn't touch flesh upon settling this time, but fabric._

 _His hands were removed and his back slammed against the wall with those unparalleled reflexes which had validated his rodent title. And there he cowered, trembling and murmuring apologies that couldn't be heard nor understood with even an ear right to his lips._ **That** _had not been his intent, not by a long shot. Touching anyone - any female - like_ **that** _was wrong, angel or not. He'd forgotten what touch could mean beyond mere connection, the shared bond of organic life… That's all he had meant to do._

 _Courage regained slowly over time. Ounce by ounce. Centimeter by centimeter, he crawled on two legs to the side of the bed farthest of the door and - with his arms crossed loyally over his chest, hands in weak fists - he curled up next to her. Tears and guilt in his asymmetrical eyes. As tiny as he could make himself and very, very sorry._

 _He was still cold._

Another sleepless night passed and sleepless morning thereafter. More than attuned to the concept of positive reinforcement, action-and-reward conditioning, Chell spent the morning learning where and how to sit in order to receive money. In between waiting for gifts, she couldn't help but wonder if there was a faster, more involved way to go about this; the most stimulating thing about sitting on the sidewalk and watching people with big, pouting eyes was when someone handed her money instead of dropping it since she got to touch their hand and think about the feeling of their skin. It always made her chest feel lighter and she shivered, wanting desperately to hug every one of these people but not warning to provoke them.

Every time traffic picked up in the area, she moved spots. By the afternoon she'd allotted a total of seventeen dollars and eighty-three cents, mostly in change. She had no idea what amount the little copper coins were worth until she offered to trade a handful of them with a lady who told her that she had no use for anything only worth one cent. It didn't take Chell long to translate "one cent" into "one-hundredth."

Thankfully, the majority of stores that weren't located right next to a transport AI recharge station were bigger and covered in windows. One had a set of double-doors and lots of people inside. Optimistic and with money crammed in her pocket, she approached the entrance, reached her arm out to open them. Leapt so far back that she almost fell into the road when they opened on their own.

Her heart pounded and she retaliated instantly, hissing and snarling ten times louder than she had at the recharging station now that she had the spit with which to do so. Those passing by dared stepping into the road to go around her, preferring to get hit by a car than have their throats bitten out by this wolverine lady.

The doors shut again. Chell gave one final snort and approached again, tense, looking between the two of them. They opened again. She hissed and cracked her knuckles as a warning. These two weren't allowed to fuck with her and she needed this to be very, very clear between the three of them.

The doors stayed open. After quite some time staring the two down, she crept inside, crouched, with a lingering hiss trailing behind. They shut and received a glare that could kill on its own. Then she straightened, rendered her face blank, shook off the visibility of her weaknesses. The weak die first.

Her trembling hidden behind an unnaturally stiff poise, she hunted through the store in search of anything familiar. It didn't take long; the bakery was right next door to baskets overflowing with fruit of every kind. Chell nearly caught herself drooling. She'd never seen so much food in one place before. Her stomach gurgling at the sight made her flinch out of her awestruck staring and into a frantic over-the-shoulder check that nobody had heard that. No one could know how hungry she was.

After some math, she had enough for a box of cookies and three apples (though a few oranges were shoved into her pockets when no one was looking). She gathered up her things and found a counter to pay for them, threw her money on the counter, and left with everything in a neat little bag. One of the apples was already in her mouth by the time she returned to her newfound arch nemeses: the automatic doors.

Chell stood a good foot away from them and narrowed her eyes, bit decisively into the apple. Tore away a chunk of it right in front of them. Hopefully that would be enough to intimidate them into opening.

It was. She took one step forward and the _clearly mortified_ doors flung open, submissive. She gave each one a dirty look on her way out as she took another gruesome bite of her apple. She could have sworn that she saw them shake a little bit.

Clothing came next. She wanted nothing more than to burn her Aperture outfit and stomp the ashes but would freeze at night and inside buildings without replacement clothes. Chell still loathed glass - unbreakable in Aperture by all but gods, the material of her prison - but at least it was see-through so she could get an idea of what was inside each store. Even places selling items that she didn't need were catalogued for later in case they ever were needed.

All her apples and cookies were finished by then. She carried the bag around until she saw somebody throw a similar bag in a little bin. She trotted over and did the same with a spark of pride. Another new thing to learn checked off the list. She was fitting in with the other humans just fine.

Chell picked up some more money on her meander around town. She found that the best places to sit were in front of places that sold food and places that had room for a lot cars to sleep in. When those two things correlated, she earned the most. By the time she found a store that sold clothing she was back up to $10.65 in coins and crumpled bills.

She spent quite a while just touching the clothes. They were so soft and flimsy compared to the sweat-stiffened tank top and thick, protective jumpsuit. Everything fur, especially, but she didn't have the money for those. She eventually settled on a few sweaters which were marked down in price for being so out-of-season, only in the store at all because the people who donated them were too wrapped up in summer to care about them anymore.

An employee still in high school spotted Chell rubbing her cheek on one and closed in on her. She cleared her throat, starling Chell and causing her to clutch the sweater, grit her teeth, prepared to snap the neck of her attacker. Relief came fast; it was just another human.

Maybe she wanted a hug. Chell hoped that she wanted a hug.

"Would you like to try that on?" the girl asked. Chell nodded and pulled the sweater down from its hook. The girl went on, "Great! You can put it on over your shirt here, or go into a changing r- Ma'am, don't!"

Chell had already begun taking off her shirt. She barely got the bottom hem up over her belly button before the girl's panicked tone and lifted palms stopped her. Oh, what, first she wasn't allowed to touch and now she wasn't allowed to change clothes? Next thing people would be telling her not to eat in front of them. Chell promised herself that no matter how hard she wanted to make friends, if someone told her to stop eating or drinking, she would punch them square in the jaw. Not being naked wouldn't kill her, though. Chell raised an eyebrow and dropped her shirt.

The girl both looked and sounded relieved. Chell made sure to keep an eye out for signs of emotion that differed from her own, well aware that answers to questions were often more clear in tone than wording. GLaDOS's constant sarcasm had made that blatant from the start.

"You can't change out _here,"_ the girl said, slowing down considerably as if explaining to a child. "You have to use a _changing room._ I'll show you where they are."

Confused, annoyed, but wanting to get this over with as murderless-ly as possible, Chell agreed to follow. She stayed quite a ways back, wary of being lead into traps whether by accident or on purpose. She was glad that she did when she saw the so-called changing rooms: tiny little windowless boxes. Barely big enough for one person to stand in, not even wide enough for full extension of the arms. Chell hissed and took half a step back, fingertips buried in the sweater she carried.

The girl wasn't frightened of Chell's bared teeth and killer stance; the threat of being in a minimum wage job forever was a more looming threat than just another crazy, unreasonable customer. Exactly how close she was to being shanked with a clothes hanger went right over her head. "Excuse me, what's wrong?"

Chell could only hiss again; she'd be more than happy to complain at length if she could but was limited to animal noises and visual aggravation. The girl sighed.

"You can't get changed _out here,_ Ms."

She wasn't getting it. Chell took one hand away from the sweater and slowly brought it in towards the other, going from open to slowly curled.

"It's… It's too small for you?"

Chell nodded. She closed her lips as a reward for correct interpretation; no more bared teeth.

"You can always use the bathrooms, instead. They're a little bit bigger. I'll show you to those."

" _A_ little _bit bigger"_ wasn't even close to being the right size - hell, the entire store as a closed space put her on edge - but Chell nodded and followed anyway. She had made it her goal to buy clothes - which _apparently_ this was a step in doing - and was going to achieve it even if it meant following this idiot around the block and up a tree.

Actually, being in a tree sounded pretty good right about now.

The girl held open the door to the Ladies' bathroom for her. Chell snorted at how white and clean it all looked, how pristine, precise. How the tiles were laid out… How low the ceiling was…

But there was another person inside. Chell licked her lip and weighed her options. The door wasn't glass nor metal; she could easily kick it down if she got locked inside. Then again, any time spent in a room like this was time outside of Aperture gone to waste. Then _again,_ the woman inside was all alone…

Chell bared her teeth at the girl on her way in, caught the door as it swung apathetically shut behind her. Then gradually let it close. A low rumble resounded from her throat, unsure if it wanted to come out as a growl or self-soothing purr. Her eyes caught the ceiling and stared it down like it could be subdued into crawling away.

This caught the attention of the other woman. She had been too distracted applying makeup in the mirror to notice the drama at the door, but now that the door was shut Chell's fearful warnings echoed. Intimidating, to say the least, being alone in a small bathroom with a woman one sudden noise away from tearing the whole place down.

She went back to her mirror work as inconspicuously as possible while Chell got her bearings. The sweater wound up on the sink counter while Chell pulled off her shirt. Her battle-hardened death stare lifted from where she'd slammed her old tank top in the sink and up to the mirror. The woman - watching for her own safety out of the corner of her eye - blinked a few times.

Chell's midsection was adorned with paint.

Handprints, specifically. Delicate handprints of green and blue and orange, sweat-smudged and half-erased over her skin but too deeply dyed into the fabric of her bra to wash out. Chell smiled and nuzzled into the bandage on her wrist, purring, bubbling with joy. The flimsy bandage gift couldn't last forever and he'd _thought of that_ and given her a mural that she could take outside instead.

Her fingers fell over where his had once been. She kept the bandage - one of these days, she was going to need it for a wound - but shifted her gratefulness from it to the marks instead.

The woman went back to putting on her makeup. Nobody that excited could really be dangerous, right?

Chell slipped on the sweater and nuzzled into the sleeves, purred, touched her face and forehead and rubbed her hands all over her chest and arms, but the novelty wore off fast. She hated this room. The shirt was on, she could go now.

The woman had packed up her things at that point and scurried past Chell to get out. Chell caught sight of her already quite a ways ahead, reaching for the handle of the door. She didn't want to be alone in here and sprinted after her, forgetting all rules of personal space to cling to the woman's arm in desperation. The woman's panic didn't last long; Chell's thousand-yard stare, her shaking, the rabbit-like heart rate thumping against her arm, all made _some_ degree of sense. She conceded to being clung to as long as it took them to get out of the doorway.

Chell let go once back in the main store. The woman stayed where she was and so did Chell. The former opened her mouth to ask if the latter were okay, if she should be worried, but her words died on her tongue. Pity had her in its clutches.

Chell tilted her head. This woman was the first non-salesperson to not only interact with her for longer than a couple of seconds, but the only person let her touch a body part other than the hand for an extended period of time.

Judging by the woman's silence, Chell could assume that she knew a question was being asked but wasn't sure what the question was. To elaborate, she held up her open arms. Tilted her head in the other direction.

The woman flinched. Ah, _now_ the question was obvious. The woman didn't even shake her head. She just quietly fled to the other end of the store.

Chell's nose twitched. She grit her teeth and licked her lip, breathing picking up in pace. Her eyes stung but weren't quite watering, yet her heavy, ragged breath could be compared to that of someone sobbing.

She forced herself to get over it, to ignore rejection, abandonment, and to carry on. She ripped a few more things off of the shelves - sweaters, pocket-covered pants, and a blanket - and slammed them down on the counter. Her mask of emotionlessness was back. Nobody could know how hard she was trying, how often she was failing. _The consequence for failure is death._

The total of all the clothes - the one she was wearing included - came up to $11. They let her take it anyway for all that she had, and she went home snuggling a pile of fabric instead of a human being. All this time clutching rigid pillows in Aperture and continuing that tradition Outside… Substitutions would have to do for yet another night.

It would wind up being a mercifully short night. Chell wandered back to her favorite place to pass time when there were no humans around: the park. She stepped between her trees and into the clearing in the corner, laid her pile of soft things down. Dropped carefully to her knees onto it, then more clumsily down on her side. Stretched and curled and pulled bunched-up fabric clothes to her chest. At last, Chell fell asleep.

She slept under the stars for the very first time.


	5. Machinery

_"'You seem a decent fellow,' Inigo said. 'I hate to kill you.'  
'You seem a decent fellow,' answered the man in black. 'I hate to die.'" _  
**\- William Goldman,** _ **The Princess Bride**_

ººººº

Though an adamant loather of all things with walls and ceilings, Chell considered herself quite the explorer. Yet all these pretty decently-sized grocery stores - including the one that the parking lot behind her park lead to - were nothing compared to the multi-story behemoth of the library.

It was absolutely massive and right next to the park; in fact, Chell got a view of one of its towering brick walls every morning from her clearing in the park. Claustrophobia only played as much a role as it did with any other building; the reason she had never gone inside had to do with not understanding _what it was._

Nothing but a desk was visible through the glass double-doors at the front and all the windows were on the second story or higher. Before, she had always looked in from the bottom of the miniscule staircase that lead up to the front door and figured now that she may get a better idea of what was sold there if she climbed up them. Still no answer, but with her face practically pressed against the glass her curiosity left her with no choice but to waltz inside.

The usual indoor-cooled air hit her exactly as expected. She was used to this but that didn't make her like it. The man behind the desk glanced up at her upon arrival but quickly fell back down into the book that he was reading. Chell knew from experience that these desk-people weren't interested in interacting unless she had something to buy.

On either side of the desk were doorways without doors and staircases next to them, leading up over the hallways. Grand, red-carpeted staircases with faux-gold handles. They looked rather out-of-place against beige walls. Fliers were plastered everywhere, pinned to bulletin boards or taped on the walls. Though the letters were lost on Chell, she liked the variety of colors that they came in. Lots of pink and orange and green. A few of them were sliced on the bottom in columns and the strips of paper made as a result were torn off. The ones that were left had things written on them, mostly numbers. She took a few.

Chell wandered to her right (the desk's left) and peered into the room. It was larger, higher-ceilinged, and full of people. Full of tables and chairs, as well, and desks and shelves.

Every single shelf was littered in a variety of books. All of them. Usually stores were diverse in what they sold - clothing stores had blankets, food stores had spoons - but not here, apparently. The entire room was nothing but books. All of the humans were reading or sorting through their reading options.

Needless to say, Chell felt very out-of-place.

Yet this wasn't a woman who would stare at a skill that she didn't have and mope the rest of the day; if there was something necessary to learn, then she would learn it. Chell marched into the big room with her head held high and pulled a book off of the shelf at random, flipped through a couple of pages. There were no pictures to go off of, no images that may give context to the meaning of the symbols. She put it back and tugged out another. This one didn't have pictures, either. That was fine. She would teach herself some other way.

She pushed the book back into its place on the shelf next to the last and returned to the lobby. The man behind the counter once again glanced at her and she returned the favor, but her gaze lingered for quite some time after his averted itself. She wondered if there existed a place that sold physical attention - hugs, hand-holding, nuzzling, and so forth. Such a store would drive Chell into bankruptcy.

The room on the other side of the lobby was much less promising. It was still wide, expansive, and even more open than the last thanks to less extensive shelving. Less people, but still a lot given Chell's low standards for what counted as a crowd. However, in place of rows and rows of shelves was a single set of desks just to the right of the center of the room. They were pressed tightly together as if they were one coherent table and were surrounded by chairs, and across from each chair was a computer.

Chell let a hiss pass through her teeth. She'd seen a few computers scattered here and there, especially on desks at stores - hell, the one in the lobby had one - but they were always alone and facing away from her. Here, they were impossible to walk past. Facing all directions, little cameras built into the tops of their monitors, and all gathered together in one potentially dangerous pack.

Normally she would've turned right around and gone back into the nicer, less-machine-filled room, but another hallway was visible from the doorway and she wanted to know what lay across the other side.

So there she hung in the doorway. Taking a few steps in, eyeing the computers, and stepping out again. Hiding behind the wall and trying to decipher a route around them. Maybe she could hide behind the shelves? Maybe she could crawl against the wall until she was across? Yet there was no physical means by which she could cross the room unseen. Every time she thought that she had figured out a route, her plans came apart the moment she stepped into the room and took a better look. Every couple of steps had her changing direction, sharply switching between forward and backward, leaping to hide behind the wall, pacing between one room and the other with visible discomfort. Essentially, she wound up in a ten-minute anxious dance between the lobby, doorway, and computer room.

Patrons didn't pay much attention to her; few looked up from their books, the sound of Chell's shuffling and the click-clack of her boots muffled by carpeting and less interesting than their studies. Her struggles only caught one person's attention: one of the employees, sitting bored at her desk in the corner. She observed Chell maneuver her way in and out and around the entrance to the computer room like a car that couldn't properly park itself for almost fifteen minutes without deciding to get involved. Partially in the hope that Chell would solve the problem herself, and partially because she wasn't sure what was wrong or how to help. This wasn't exactly a commonplace issue, some strange woman fluttering around a room but for some reason unable to enter.

The librarian - a stout woman with too many wrinkles for her age - stood up when she realized that this problem wasn't going to fix itself. She fiddled with her fingers, took the long route around some of the shelves on her way to the doorway. Chell glanced at her but recognized her from the desk and knew that interaction was Off Limits until she had something to buy.

The librarian glanced behind the woman at first in the hopes of an easy explanation and possibly a solution. All she got was an awkward period of eye-contact and a shrug from the man behind the lobby desk.

A low snarl had her attention whipped back to Chell, who appeared to be attempting to threaten the computers that she'd been glaring daggers at for the past fifteen minutes. Chell's nose was scrunched, her teeth periodically bared, fists curled tight. She looked ready to snap someone in half...and she was, if that someone was a computer.

Her eyes darted to the librarian a few times. They stood somewhat close together and Chell felt mildly uncomfortable with a stranger at her side, watching her fail and fail, potentially hiding a weapon. Unfortunately, the librarian didn't understand Chell's paranoia. All she saw was a very angry woman who she was going to have to deal with.

"Ah. Uh." Probably not the best introduction. The librarian raised her hand to tap Chell's shoulder but thought better of it; Chell's attention snapped fully to her the second she spoke and her hand was left hovering. Try as she might to study up on the truth behind mental illness, the idea of dealing with a crazy patron terrified her.

Chell watched the librarian for quite some time while she tried to catch her voice. Chell's fists were still curled, poison still in her hard glare, but she did her best to diminish the rest of her visible frustration. Unaware that what remained of it was being horribly misinterpreted. The librarian's sudden change in location and job description had Chell worried deeply. The two were frozen with nerves and fear but were incapable of recognizing the same emotion in the other.

The librarian was the first to speak up thanks to Chell's lack of ability to speak at all. "You're- Is there a r-reason that you're...not- That you're walking around the doorway? I mean, can I help you at all?"

Chell's expression softened only slightly. She was hesitant to admit fear, but _anger_ was no sign of weakness. She could easily admit to anger. Chell huffed and pointed to the computers.

"The… Those? What about them?"

She huffed a little louder and took a step back, scowling at the computer-covered desk. Staring at them so hard that the librarian had no choice but to understand how upset she was.

"Okay. Can… Can I help you? With...that? I'm n-not sure...what I...can do… What about them is bothering you?"

Their presence. Their existence. Their all-seeing cameras and bright screens. She pointed to them again with enough force to punch. The librarian flinched.

"Them…? Just. Them? Do you want to use them, Ms…? You know you're allowed t-to?" She took a step away and leaned around Chell's front for a better examination of her expression. No, she still just looked angry. "Can you tell me? This… I may be able to understand you if you s-spoke, Ms…"

Chell's sheer rage gave way for annoyance. She licked her upper lip and sighed deeply, let her arm lower. Then turned attention to the librarian with her chin tilted up and two fingers on her throat, one on each side of the middle to pull the skin taught. To make the clean, white surgical scar down the center more obvious. She couldn't tell anything to anyone.

The librarian's response was immediate. Her eyes stuck open and she took another step back, began fiddling with her hands again. "I'm sorry. I… M-maybe… You could write- No." She looked at her desk and the writing utensils on it all the way across the room. If she fled the scene now, she'd never build up the courage to return and this poor, insane lady would be stuck in doorway-limbo forever. "N-never mind. Uhh… Maybe… T-try...gesturing it. I want to help you. Show me, if you can, please, how I can help. I want to help."

Chell made an effort to calm herself but it was hard with the looming threat of AI. Her choices were Admit Fear or Express Irritation, and she chose the safer. Her first instinct was to point to the computers again but that had yet to work. She needed another way to get her message across.

She made sure that the librarian was watching. Then hid her face behind her hands alongside a slight crouch, followed by ducking behind the wall with just the top of her head showing through the doorway. Then returned to the doorway, pointed to the computers. Pointed to the librarian with a tilt of her head.

"You want to. Hide. Hide from the computers?"

Chell nodded with a little smile as reward. Yes, she wanted to get across the room without them knowing that she was there. "Hide" was close enough.

The librarian did her best not to let the oddness of the situation get to her. She looked at the computers over her shoulder and then back at Chell. Though she managed to avoid raising an eyebrow or muttering "huh," her jaws remained dumbfoundedly open. "So you...want me to lead you across the room…"

Chell nodded again. Her smile was gone and her expression blank. Her fingers were loose and flexing every few moments, ready to strike but feigning passiveness. For now.

"Yes. Sure. I- Yes. How do…? Uh." The librarian moved to stand completely in front of Chell and held her arms out at her sides. Chell understood the signal effortlessly and crouched so that she was hidden behind the smaller woman. The librarian then crab-walked around in a semi-circle while Chell followed one step at a time. Invisible, she figured. She kept her eyes on them just in case.

Yet about halfway across the length of the desks, Chell froze up. On the short end, there were only two computers in front of her to veil herself from. But she didn't know the range of their cameras. With eight in row, those on the far left and right may have been able to locate her.

Chell's response to this realization was to back up with her teeth bared and shoulders arched. The librarian whimpered and bit her lip, believing herself to be the target of Chell's terrified vexation until she followed her line of sight around behind her. The computers again, though she couldn't for the life of her figure out _why._

A hiss startled her attention back to Chell, who had begun to visibly shake. The librarian felt paralyzed, trapped, but her vigilance towards Chell caught the spark of fear that she hadn't noticed before. The glint of horror that had been so well-masked not long ago. Sympathy squeezed the librarian's heart and she whined, cursed herself for being so easy to grip on an emotional level. She refused to act on her compassion at first - it could easily get her killed, what with Chell still snarling death threats at inanimate objects - yet another burst of pity did her in when Chell bumped into the shelf behind her with a startled yet silent yelp. The split second that surprise had erased Chell's mask played in slow motion for the librarian and the image stayed long after Chell had regained herself, steadied, and returned to growling.

Chell refused to flinch as the librarian approached but she turned her growling towards her; trembling was pathetic, as was cowering so close to the ground. She had no reason to believe that the librarian wasn't about to kill her but waited to be struck before attacking; Chell would rather not snap the neck of her only barrier between herself and the computers if she could help it.

The librarian crouched in front of her with her palms up. One of the last things that Chell was expecting. Her gaze flickered between her and the computers, eyes widened and her breathing fast, heavy, skin pale. The librarian waited until she was being looked at before coming any closer, one inch per glance. Eventually, Chell noticed that she was being closed in on and leaned against the shelf with her focus fully on the librarian. Eyes darting around her body in search of weaponry. Glaring at her open palms in case they became fists or claws. Checking her lips for bared teeth. Examining the librarian's expression, nothing struck her as dangerous.

She seemed worried, in fact.

"Okay…" Her voice was gentle, low. Chell closed her lips around her teeth and tried to steady her breathing. She was beginning to doubt that this person was in the right mood to attack. She didn't sound like she was lying, either. "Okay… Okay, come here."

The librarian reached for Chell, hovered one hand over her forearm. Patted it. Settled down and rested it there when it wasn't ripped off. Chell gulped and touched the back of her hand. Traced her fingertips over the knuckles, then clutched her wrist. The librarian bit her lip and reached the other arm around Chell's front to settle on her other arm. She wasn't grabbing, just resting.

She and Chell were making eye contact now. She started to stand and Chell came with her, slowly, leaning into her shield. The librarian, mumbling "it's okay" on repeat despite not believing it to be okay whatsoever, copied and leaned back until her hands had slid around Chell's back. Chell's arms raised to do the same, and she shifted her gaze to the computers as she was lead away from them. Over to the other side of the room and behind a shelf, out of sight of her technological foes.

She calmed. Breathed deeply and purred, began to loosen her grip on the back of the librarian's shirt. It wasn't until she nuzzled her face in the librarian's hair that she realized that the other's arms were still around her. Not expressing discomfort nor disgust nor annoyance.

Still hugging her.

Chell's purring faded out for a while as she contemplated this but it started back up again when she decided to make the most of it. No need to scare her friend off. They were friends now, right?

Likewise, the librarian had begun to ease up on her embrace and was about to pull away but the purr ordered her otherwise. Clearly, this strange woman still needed attention. She mustered up a motherly tone and murmured a few "there-there"s to go alongside gentle back-rubs. Even for her, things had gone from awkward to affectionate in an uncomfortably short amount of time.

She only felt allowed to pull away when Chell did so first, and Chell only did so first to go explore the very back-of-the-room hallway that had nearly killed the curious cat. She dragged her new friend with her via a tight grip on her wrist, blind to hesitation. Desperate to know what was on the other side of the hallway.

Just bathrooms.

Her disappointment was tangible in the thick, eye-rolling sigh that came forcefully through her nostrils. Her grip on the librarian's wrist tightened involuntarily, but a whine drew attention to it and she loosened up. She even nuzzled her in apology before letting go and exiting the hallway.

Rubbing her wrist, the librarian returned to her desk. Chell picked a few random books from the shelf and scanned them for pictures. None. All of them were put back. She vowed to come by later with a better solution than searching fruitlessly for pictures, maybe explore the upstairs a bit more, but right now she needed to rest. The only safe place to do that was her corner of the park.

Chell inched to the edge of the shelf and stared at the librarian at her desk, leaning back in her swivel chair and watching the other patrons with an expression of trying to process what the hell just happened. Chell tensed and knocked on the shelf which easily gained the librarian's attention. They shared several seconds of eye contact that even the socially-inept Chell would have described as awkward.

Realizing her duty and, by extension, her fate, the librarian stood up. She inhaled courage and slunk around the shelves to Chell's side, held out her arms. Closed them around Chell, who crouched ever so slightly to hide behind her friend, and the two of them crossed the room.

Chell kept the embrace long after they'd reached the safety of the lobby. Only an awkward giggle from the librarian made her pull away, and that was only to examine her expression. The librarian looked worried except for a taught-lipped, shivering smile.

"Are you… Are you good? I mean, can you…? There's no c-computers out here. You can… You don't need me anymore, I can go...back…"

Chell nodded. She pat the librarian's head and watched her slink back to her desk, waited until she was safe behind it and sitting in her chair. Then waved to the man at the front desk and left the library. Trotted down the steps. Watched the horizon change from gold to orange with the setting sun.

She went home.

Her corner of the park had steadily become more welcome. Thick blankets made up her bed and a few plushie animals were piled together to make the world's most cuddly pillow. Water bottles and snacks, clothing, and eating utensils were up in the branches of surrounding trees. Many balanced in the branches and just as many were tied into place with string.

Here, no one was around to see her rub her eyes and she didn't have to stifle any yawns. Chell laid down under a few of the blankets and picked one toy to squeeze while the rest cushioned her head. Today was an unexpected success. Chell mulled over how soft her new friend's touch was in excitement. The plush in her arms was worthless in comparison, which bothered her. Nothing was going to hold a candle to real human affection now that she had received it. Sleeping with a stuffed animal wouldn't be the same now that she had hugged a real human being.

And it wasn't safe to bring her friend home, either. To let her know where she slept. To be unconscious around her. Friends could stop being friends in an instant. They didn't need a reason. They didn't need to give any warning.

Chell turned her head up at the infinite sky and the materializing stars. At the clouds as they faded into temporary nonexistence.

At the moon.

She shivered and pulled the blankets up higher. No, friends had no obligation to stay friends forever.


	6. Storm

" _Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."_  
 **\- Ray Bradbury,** _ **Fahrenheit 451**_

ººººº

As far as Chell was concerned, the entire park was her property and everyone who came to play or picnic there were just guests.

Come September, she had built the courage to return to the sandbox. Her bravery partially came from there being more children than usual and most of them choosing to run around the grass where her boots wouldn't sink. They and a lot of their parents wore bright pointy hats and the benches were surrounded by decorated boxes. Attracted by the colors and energy, Chell made a decision to insert herself into whatever was happening.

Many of the parents recognized her as the homeless lady who lived here, insane but harmless. Some of them had been present for her previous attempt at making friends and couldn't quite get the image of her dazed, vacant panic out of their heads. Between murmurs and reminders, they weren't sure if it was safe to let her play with their kids.

Yet the children themselves had little problem with her. The long-taught fear of strangers fell away from them when she began trying to learn the rules to their game through awkward participation. A select few of the kids - accidentally trained by their parents to believe that adults were silly by nature - broke away from playtime to explain it to her. "Embarrassment" wasn't quite a strong enough word to describe Chell's spike in heart rate when she realized that she hadn't been fast enough to learn the game on her own, but it was all that the kids were capable of reading from her.

The game was simple: one person pretended to manifest as a being only known as the It. The It's job was to touch another player, thereby passing its identity onto a new player. The untouched players must keep away from the It at all costs.

Chell licked her lip and nodded. One of the kids explaining slapped her leg, proclaimed her the It, and ran off. As instructed, she gave chase.

Long Fall boots hindered speed but not as much as stubby legs and untied shoe laces. Within moments, some unfortunate kid received the pat on the head that would transfer the It's role. The moment contact was made, Chell turned and ran to the other side of the group of kids. Thankfully, the new It's first instinct was not to immediately return the favor; It spent much of its time chasing the other nearby kids instead of the far-away adult.

Chell took this time to observe their play style. The way they called encouragement and warnings to one-another made the game appear cooperative, yet never once did the children team up in an effort against their adversary. They ran in random patterns without care for the locations of their peers. This lack of teamwork made sense; if the It were some kind of contagious entity, the smartest thing to do would be to avoid making emotional attachments and stay away from other individuals. Yet they ran without strategy, many with their arms out and not looking where they were going. Bumping into each other, tripping over things.

Good. This meant that she was the best player. She had the most advantage. None of the others stood a chance against her.

By then, at least four other kids had become the It. She tracked them quietly, emotionlessly, and completely still from her spot at the edge of their unspoken playground borders. The parents had their eyes on her but the kids forgot that she was there until one of the Its, slow and stumbling and a sore loser, saw that Chell hadn't moved since she last glanced over. Thinking her easy prey, the child gave chase.

Chell's first instinct upon recognizing a threat coming towards her was to snap its neck, but this was a pretending game. If she _pretended_ to snap the child's neck, she would be touched, and therefor she would lose. Her second instinct fell in line with the rules of the game and she fled in a burst of desperate speed, leapt for a tree and climbed to the top. The children were too short to reach the first branch and even if they found something to stand on, she could jump down before they could climb up.

Shockingly, this didn't warrant much praise. The kids appeared annoyed, called her a cheater, and went about their game without her.

Cheater? By what rule? No one had said climbing trees was against the rules. With a huff, she jumped down and stood in the middle of their game, waiting for someone to explain or let her back in. The sore loser It had passed on her status and the new one came running after Chell before long. Avoiding him was easy even without trees. Chell made a mental note that kids weren't very smart.

A new adult arrived with a plain white box. It didn't hold Chell's attention for long until the smell of sugar hit her nose. The kids were interrupted and ushered towards it. Chell followed. She already knew what was inside the box.

Cake. Bright red with black, gold, and white decorations, letters she couldn't read, and tiny wax sticks that the adults lit with seven tiny, pretty fires. Someone counted, then everyone sang. Chell listened with a touch of guilt and vaguely moved her lips; being mute for so long had made her forget how to even mouth words. Hopefully, this still counted as being involved. Nobody seemed to notice that she couldn't sing along.

Then one of the kids blew out the little fires. Chell exhaled at the same time as him, moved away from the direction the wind blew. As much as she loved fire, its aftermath wasn't her friend. Smelling smoke, she had learnt the hard way in the depths of Aperture, was an almost-guaranteed slap in the face from bad memories.

Her mouth watered. Her eyes flickered up to the knife held by one of the adults, and behind the part of her screaming "cake" over and over again came a hundred ways to get that knife out of his hands. It wouldn't come to that and Chell knew this but her brain concocted several possible scenarios for her anyway.

The children were served first. Chell's perceived patience was actually her stopping herself from punting kids out of the way in fear that she would hurt them; they were small and stupid and fragile and there was plenty of cake.

Despite her kindness, the adults still harbored a collective fear of the homeless stranger. It took them an embarrassing amount of time to realize that she wanted a slice, but when they saw her staring the cake down like she wanted to marry it, a second adult swooped in to cut a piece for her while the kids were still being served. Best to appease the scary lady rather than wait for her to drop-kick their kids out of the way. As usual, Chell took advantage of being handed a gift to touch the parent's hand.

Half of her bites were with the fork and half were sticking her face into the cake directly. The familiar taste of Success filled her mouth and Pavlov rolled over in his grave. She had done something Good and this was her reward. Maybe she should play with the kids more often.

Before the kids were done eating (read: licking the frosting off of) their cakes, the parents once again called them around something. Chell had finished by then. She dropped her plate in the trash, put her fork in her pocket for later use, and wiped her mouth before joining them in a huddle around the colorful boxes.

The same kid who blew out the candles tore into the decorative paper with viciousness that made Chell both proud and jealous. For someone who wasn't a fan of organized ceremonies, so far they had all been her favorite things: social interaction, sugar, and destruction. Yet the box itself was spared. It turned out to be some plastic container with toys inside. The child hugged one of the friends, thanked them, and picked another box to tear open. This one had a bunch of little things in it as well. He hugged another friend, thanked them, and Chell caught on.

To the relief of the parents, she snuck away from the park. Stocking up on food the day before had left her without much money left over and she didn't have time to pander so her options were limited. There was a store across the street that she had browsed around but never bought anything from that had a few small, plastic objects similar to the ones she had seen the kid receive. That seemed like the best option.

Though she couldn't see what they were doing, Chell could make sure that the crowd of people hadn't dispersed through the store's windows. Quick glances through it to make sure that she still had time were frequent. She found a little dinosaur toy in some of the same colors as the cake and brought it to the counter, took out the $2.26 she had. The toy came up to $2.50 but the cashier let her have it, partially because she looked desperate and partially because her fidgeting scared him.

Back at the park, she evaded the crowd on the way to her private hideout in the corner. The convenience of blankets and sleeves meant that she had plenty of napkins left over to unfold and wrap around the dinosaur toy. She took the lace out of a shoe that she had found days before and tied it like a bow to keep the napkin on.

The gift held close to her chest, she re-entered the party. Right on time; the kid was mid-hug after his final (soon to be penultimate) gift. She waited until the child was finished with his hug before kneeling down and setting it in his hands.

He was confused at first until he recognized the resemblance between the shoelace and a bow. The tight circle that the parents had made loosened a bit and their quiet, judgemental murmurs became peppered with questions. The kid was more delicate with this gift than the others and he wasn't as excited once he saw what it was, but his smile, though little, was genuine. In routine, he awkwardly stepped forward with his arms out and Chell enthusiastically accepted, pulled him into a hug. His parents stepped forward just in case.

Well past the time limit which turned "friendly embrace" into "pure awkwardness and discomfort" for everyone except Chell, she let go and stood up. The boy put the dinosaur toy with the rest of his gifts and dragged the other kids to the sandbox. Some chose to stick to the grass and Chell was eager to follow them, but an adult tapped her shoulder before they could finish explaining Hide-and-Seek to her. He reached for her arm to pull her aside, thought better of it, and gestured instead. She followed, unnerved by the hushed tones he spoke in; only people with secrets whispered during such exciting times.

"You live here, right? In the park? I've seen you around."

She nodded. Refused to make herself readable.

The adult sounded on-edge. "So you don't have a house? I'd hate to sound rude, but…do you have a _job?"_

Chell's mask softened as she picked up on the minute differences between the usual harsh whispers of a liar and the nervous, delicate mutter coming from this person. She had to contemplate his question for a few blinks. She had things to do, but those things were created of her own volition. They changed daily and were fluid based on given needs and desires.

So no. She shook her head. No job.

She tensed as his hand went into his pocket. "How much did that toy cost you?"

Without taking her eyes off of his hand, she held up two fingers and then five.

"Two...fifty?"

She nodded.

He took out his wallet and she relaxed to a small degree. He pulled three dollars from it and held them out. "Thanks."

Chell took them. She wasn't sure why he was paying her back and no one else but was happy for the money. As always, she used gift-receiving as an excuse to touch his hand.

"Really," he continued, "That was nice of you. Have a good day, okay?" He glanced up, squinted. "I think it's going to rain soon so you might want to get indoors." Then he returned to the other parents.

Chell waved and put the money in her pocket. She looked up and searched for anything out of place with the sky. There were more clouds than usual. It was somewhat gray. She didn't know what "rain" meant or why it was dangerous but resolved to stay outside for no other reason than to find out.

By the time she turned around to join the kids in their game, they were gone. Some were in the sandbox saying goodbye to the center-of-attention kid but most were heading for their cars. If only she could speak or read; she would have asked the kid what he did to get cake and presents and hugs. Considering his playtime displays of low intelligence, she doubted it was any feat too monumental for her to copy. Yet her communication restrictions prevented anything outside of a few gestures that the kid didn't understand well enough to respond to; he wasn't even sure if she was trying to get his attention or swat a fly away.

He was the last one to leave. His parents meticulously combed the grass for scraps of tape and paper to throw away before stuffing his gifts into the car. His mom carried him away.

Chell looked up again. Maybe "rain" meant that night came sooner than usual. It was oddly dark for this time of day. She didn't like that. Yet the father's warnings to be indoors kept her from reaching such a conclusion. Night wasn't dangerous, just lonely and boring.

Something high up crackled and boomed. Chell silent-yelped and jumped back against a tree. Curiosity and survival instincts battled each other until they agreed to watch from somewhere deemed safe: underneath the biggest tree in the park. If anything happened, its branches would either protect her on their own or serve as weapons.

Another crackle-boom. Clouds swirled overhead. Chell shuddered and snarled and refused to take her eyes off of the sky. She bared her teeth like it could see and fear her, like she could scare off the rain by appearing more dangerous than it.

She couldn't. At first she wasn't sure what the change in her line of sight was, little white drops falling fast enough to make her think that her vision had gone blurry. Then she picked up on the rapid sounds of them hitting the grass and looked down.

Water was falling from the sky.

That wasn't so bad. Yes, it was cold, but it wasn't dangerous. Wait, what if it wasn't water? Chell stuck her left hand out from under the tree and flinched as a drop of cold water hit the back of her hand. It didn't burn through, didn't smell funny, and upon licking her hand, it just tasted like water.

Chell licked her lip. Then slunk out from under the tree. Little drops of water hit her head and shoulders and she began to rub where she was wet in an attempt to bathe for free. She tilted her head back and opened her mouth but didn't get much to drink.

The storm picked up as time went on. Sharp wind blew past and made her shiver. She saw cars slowing down on the road, communicating through aggressive beeps and honks. She wondered if they were going to fight and if the humans inside them would be able to survive that happening. Why were the cars suddenly so angry? Chell stepped a bit closer to the road. Still a safe distance, still out of their sight, but near enough to see their tires slip on the gathering water.

The roads were starting to flood. The sky crackle-boomed and Chell hissed at it. Between those yet-unexplained noises, her inability to hide her weak shivering in this increasing cold, and the threat of flooding (could she even swim?), Chell began to realize why rain was such a bad thing.

She began to move back to her tree but the water mixing with dirt under her feet fought her desire to get away. It wasn't as strong as the sand, hardly any suction at all, but all it took was the reminder of being trapped to send Chell into a frenzy. She sprinted for the nearest tree and scrambled up, teeth chattering as her skin and dampened clothes brushed against wet leaves, soaking her further.

Another gust of wind came through, gentle and freezing, and Chell made an effort to stand on the branch she clung to. Maybe leaping from tree to tree would be safer than potentially getting stuck in the mud and drowning on the ground.

The tree closest to the library's entrance was still too far away from the concrete. She aimed a jump for as close as she could get and landed in the grass, rushed out of it and scraped the offending mud from her boots, huddled under the awning next to the unnecessary stairway which lead to the entrance. She contemplated her options: stay out here and potentially drown, or go into the library and risk looking cold and weak in front of others?

Drowning seemed safer. She'd never been underwater before. Who knows? Maybe swimming would be easy.

The roaring, honking fits of frustrated cars changed her mind. She didn't want to be around to dodge collateral damage and debris when they inevitably decided to kill each other. She squeezed her sleeves and ponytail to wring out some of the water. Then shook herself off like a wet dog, practiced holding still despite an urge to tremble and chatter her teeth. She couldn't stop in the wind but when it wasn't blowing she managed. It would be warmer indoors, anyway.

Her arms lowered from being wrapped around her chest to stiff at her sides. White-knuckled fists were ready to knock teeth out of anyone looking to take her down while she was weakened. One last shuddering breath came out before she stood up straight, chin up, and pushed the double-doors apart.

The man from behind the desk looked up at her and wondered if she'd been here before. He recognized her face. When she made eye contact with him and hissed, he remembered, _Oh, yeah, that's the woman who spent half an hour freaking out over computers and nearly killed my coworker._ His palms went up and she calmed down, closed her lips around her teeth.

"Do you...need a towel, ma'am?"

She shook her head.

He set his hands on the desk. "Just trying to get away from the rain, eh?"

She gave a shallow nod, shoulders stiffening. Coming in here was a choice. She wasn't forced inside. Nothing could force her to do anything.

"Yeah, it's… You know. Really coming down out there."

Chell stared him down.

"...Yeah." He pulled out a novel and pretended to read it.

Chell side-stepped to the computers' room and peered at them from behind the wall. They didn't appear to be plotting anything, but that didn't mean that they weren't. Anybody who told _them_ her current condition would have hell to pay.

The librarian stationed in that area - the same from last time - regretted looking up from her book. She crouched a bit and stuck her head between the open pages as if she could pretend that she hadn't seen Chell, but the jolted-ness of her movements only made her more noticeable.

Chell's gaze fluttered between her and the computers. No one was trustworthy, but this human was a blessed combination of friendly and weak. If she wasn't to stand around being bored for however long it took rain to stop happening, she needed to pick something to do. She chose friendship.

The librarian didn't have to pretend not to notice Chell's tap on the wall; it was too quiet for her to hear. The next attempt to get her attention was a much more impatient smack - not even knocking, just an open-hand punch to the wall - that made her jump too much to say that it went unnoticed.

She slowly lifted her bookmark with shaky hands and even more slowly set her book on the desk. Then stood, took her sweet time pushing her chair in, straightening out her clothes, brushing her bangs back...so on and so forth. Chell's shift to hide near-completely behind the wall with only her nose and fingers visible made it even harder to approach her; the librarian felt like Chell was going to pop out and screech like in a horror movie.

She didn't. She stayed behind the wall, impatiently waiting for the librarian to stop standing in the doorway and enter the lobby. The librarian didn't know she wanted her to exit the computer room completely and stood around until a huff got her ass in gear, startling her into the lobby.

Chell's blank expression of "I have no weaknesses" was marred by her nose, scrunched in annoyance, which teetered her between intended emotionlessness and keen rage. The librarian kept her distance. "Do you...need help crossing the computers again, Ms?"

Chell shook her head.

"Then. Why did- You called me here, right…?"

She nodded, prying herself away from the wall.

The librarian took a step back. "W-what for, then?"

No response. Chell intended to reply but had to fix her expression first, and the two seconds that took was enough to prompt the librarian into speaking again.

"If you don't need me," she said, slinking towards the doorway, "I'll just head back to-"

Chell snatched her wrist. She yelped. The employee at the desk hovered one hand over the Security button on his phone. No violence came. Chell's grip loosened enough to let the librarian run if she tried to...and goddamn, did she want to. Yet the void in Chell's gaze couldn't draw the librarian away from the fact that she was sopping wet. The hand around her wrist was utterly still, a blatant effort not to shiver.

Why her? Of all the people this crazy woman could have gone to for comfort, why _her?_

"...What, exactly, do you want me to do? I don't understand. I'm sorry."

Chell let go of her hand and sat down with her knees curled up to her chest, rather forcefully patted the ground next to her.

"I can't. I have to stay at my station-"

Chell patted the ground again with a tiny growl. The librarian sat down next to her and twiddled her fingers, gaze fitting around the room. The man behind the desk watched them for a few minutes before calling the number of the phone connected to the librarian's desk. It rang and Chell jumped at the distant sound but it went unnoticed by the librarian herself. All she noticed was the insane person next to her suddenly jolting. Cue thirty seconds of hand-holding and telling Chell that everything was fine for the sake of not becoming collateral damage.

Well, that backfired. The man behind the desk called again, but this time he pointed towards the doorway and explicitly stated that the librarian was getting a call. She bit her lip and told Chell that she really, really needed to go back to her desk, and after some time, Chell nodded. This was more boring than she thought it was going to be, anyway.

Yet when the librarian stood up to return, Chell stood with her. The librarian made a brief effort to shuffle slightly faster, knowing Chell would never follow her across the computers alone; she didn't expect to be grabbed by the back of her shirt collar. Chell's intention wasn't to choke her by any means, just to keep her from going too far in a " _you forgot about me, silly!"_ manner. The fact that it wasn't taken as intended went completely over her head. The man at the desk was once again gearing up to call Security.

The librarian took a small step closer to Chell and Chell, in turn, let go of her shirt.

"Are you- You're coming with me, then?"

Chell nodded. Never mind the librarian not facing her. The librarian remembered that Chell couldn't speak and turned around. Another nod, this time seen.

"Okay. S-stay behind me, I suppose… Those darn computers, right?" She gave a nervous chuckle that came off as deeply unsettling for reasons that Chell couldn't quite place.

Rather than walk directly around them, the librarian stayed between the computers and Chell long enough to get behind a shelf. From there, Chell felt comfortable to walk ahead on her own and meet the librarian at her desk. As long as she crouched behind it, the computers couldn't see her, so that's exactly what she opted to do.

The phone had long stopped ringing. The librarian sat in her chair and watched Chell rummage through her supplies like an adventurous child. Staplers, paper clips, makeup application tools, rubber bands, her purse, stamps, printer ink, scotch tape, and an empty Doritos bag, all carelessly picked up and thrown out of place. The librarian came to an embarrassingly slow, false conclusion that Chell was looking for something to write with.

"Oh, here, l-let me just…" She leaned over and snagged some paper from her printer as well as a few pens from the top of her desk and handed them to Chell, who in all honesty was just looking around for fun and wasn't sure why she was being given these things. Surely the librarian knew that she couldn't read; Chell knew it, and wasn't trying to hide it, so it must have been common knowledge. Maybe she wanted her to draw?

She was dry enough by then that the paper didn't rip while she doodled. The librarian watched her wrist move in ways that obviously weren't producing coherent letters but refused to give up hope of receiving an explanation - or at least a "thank you."

Chell finished drawing and shifted to sit criss-cross, turned her paper around and held it up for the librarian to see. It was her in the park with the kids when she had climbed up the tree during Tag. Her style was childish and sketchy but every detail of her drawing was accurate, however badly interpreted, thanks to a photographic memory.

The librarian blinked and adjusted her glasses. Of all the things she had been expecting from the technophobic time-bomb, this was not it. "Oh, uh… Is that the...park? The park next door?"

Chell nodded with a tiny smile.

"And someone's in the-" Wait, was the person in the tree wearing hooked boots? "Is that you in the tree, Ms?"

She nodded again.

"Ahh. And there's a lot of people down there. Smaller...people. I think. Are those kids? There were kids in the park?"

Another nod.

"Were you scared of them? Is that why you were in the tree?"

Chell shook her head.

"It was a game, then?"

Chell nodded.

"That sounds like it was...fun. Um." She bit her lip, tore her eyes away from the paper for a moment to scan the room. Then turned attention back to Chell and the toddler-esque drawing. "...Ms, if I may ask. Um. Can you _read?"_

Chell shook her head.


	7. Animals

" _Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them."  
_ **\- Lemony Snicket,** _ **Horseradish**_

ººººº

What someone who couldn't read was doing in a library was beyond her. Right now it was storming hard enough for 4:00pm to be mistaken for midnight and she understood the craving for shelter, but what was Chell's excuse for last time? If she couldn't read, what had she been doing here other than hissing at computers?

Maybe she wanted to learn. Maybe this was her way of asking. Maybe she really had no idea what kind of building she was in and just wandered inside because she had nothing better to do.

That last one sounded the most plausible.

Chell went back to playing with everything in her desk after only a few seconds of stunned silence. The librarian kept an eye on her; childishly picking through her things, turning them around in her hands, like she'd never seen them before. She tore open the empty chips bag and licked the interior for spare crumbs, took the old rubber band out of her ponytail without wiping off her fingers first, replaced it with a wider one from the desk.

"There's. Um. I really-" The librarian mumbled, and Chell's attention shot towards her quick enough to shut her up. She waited for the librarian to finish her sentence. She didn't, so Chell went back to exploring.

Really, she didn't know what to say. This human was a mess of adult dangerousness and childlike wonder that she wasn't sure what to do with.

"Do you-? Uh." Chell looked up again with equally intimidating speed, one eyebrow raised in annoyance. This time, she continued before Chell could lose interest. "Do you...want to learn?"

Chell blinked. The librarian's intent to teach this odd stranger how to read flooded out at her blank stare, a reminder that she wasn't dealing with someone _normal._ Yet she didn't have a chance to retract the offer before Chell nodded, her smile widening and her eyes bright. The librarian gulped. She needed a loophole.

"Then...I know a place where you might be able to do that." _Nice save._

Fully expecting the librarian to continue on her own, Chell kept staring.

"...It's...upstairs. On the left, after entering. The one closest to- Oh, hell." With a dutiful sigh, the librarian stood up and offered her hand to help Chell do the same. She turned it down by standing up without it. The librarian mumbled on, "Let me help you cross...the…"

Crossing the computers was routine by then. Chell hardly even glanced toward them and the librarian only had a _slight_ concern that her neck was going to be snapped.

Once in the safety of the lobby, they separated, but Chell kept the librarian's hand squeezed in her own. Which wasn't too shocking, when the librarian thought about it. The front desk jockey kept a close eye on them as they went upstairs. Chell took two steps at a time and the librarian took one, turning their hand-holding into borderline dragging as they got higher and higher.

Before she even reached the top of the staircase, they could see the dazzling array of bright colours and hear the faint jittery noise of activity that the lower sections were void of. Chell let out a gentle gasp when her foot hit the final step.

Paper designs resembling grass and trees were pressed against every wall except for where the windows were, wide and open and letting in blocks of dusky sunlight. Everything was rich in hue and adorably small. Hard ground had been replaced with soft carpet and even that was covered with rugs. Vaguely chair-shaped bags lay around ready to be squeezed and curled into. Even the tiny tables and chairs had rainbow polka-dot patterns, and instead of being empty spaces purely for setting books onto, they had crayons and coloring pages.

Chell's low standards for what constituted as a crowed were easily met by the three separate families all huddled in this paradise space. Two of the children - much smaller than the ones at the party - were coloring at the same table, and the other - only a tad smaller - was reading on one of the squishy bags. Their parents were scattered around the place with their own books from the downstairs Boring Sections.

The librarian was grateful to get her hand back. Chell abandoned her to explore every inch of the place. Even the books in the shelves were more vibrant than they were downstairs. She pulled one out at random and-

 _Pictures._ She ran to the librarian and threw the arm not holding onto the picture book around her shoulders in a half-hug, buried her face in her shoulder. This would do perfectly.

Yet the librarian wasn't finished yet. Oh, how she _wished_ to be, but she wasn't. She gestured for Chell to crouch (the chairs were too small to sit in) by a table that wasn't already occupied and wait, an order which she was more than happy to comply with. The librarian meandered off and returned seconds later with a few books, all of which had the same set of symbols somewhere on their covers: "alphabet."

"Start with these," the librarian advised. "Good luck."

Chell opened up the first one, hearing the librarian's briskly fading footsteps as she analyzed the first page. There was a picture of an apple, and the symbols " _A is for Apple. Awesome Apple!"_ with the first, all-alone A being bigger than the full words. Chell already had an understanding of letters representing sounds and knew what punctuation symbols meant; it was a matter of piecing together which symbols made what sounds.

" _A,"_ she figured, had some sound involved in the word " _apple."_ But what? What did all the other words mean? Chell skipped to the next page. Maybe this one would answer her questions.

" _B is for Balloon. Blue balloon!"_ Chell didn't recognize that image at all. Something floating with a string attached? There had been a few at the party but that was all that she knew. She couldn't learn to read it if she didn't even know what it was.

She glanced up at the children at the table next to her. They weren't having trouble. What if they saw that she was? Did this count as failure? She was _trying._

Another thing that they could do but she couldn't stuck out to her: both children were murmuring the words out loud to themselves. She could hardly make out what they were saying underneath their rough library-whispers and thick preschooler accents, but with their eyes practically glued to the pages and no one listening, there wasn't much else that they could have been saying other than the words on the page.

Chell set down her alphabet book and scooted towards the nearest kid. Bit by bit, stopping every inch or so, she discreetly made her way over. She glanced at his book with a tilt of her head to better hear what he was saying: "Th...the...c...c...cow...g...oes…mmm…"

All attempts at subtlety failed at once. The kid looked over his shoulder and Chell flung herself backward, stopping just short of slamming into a shelf. There wasn't much that a kid could do to her, failure or not, but she hadn't been expecting to be caught so suddenly.

The kid himself was understandably confused about the presence of a strange woman. He was too young for any "strangers are bad" lessons to really sink in and began rummaging around in his brain for reasons why a grown-up might be sitting right behind him. Eventually, he came up with "Do you wanna borrow the book when I'm done?"

Chell shrugged. She wanted the book, yes, but more importantly, she wanted it read out loud to her. The kid went back to reading and she crawled close again, less sneaky about it now that the kid knew she was there. He didn't seem to mind.

She didn't know where he was on the page until he turned it and from there did her best to follow along. Yet he only got a few words in before checking over his shoulder again with a child-whisper of, "Do you wanna read it to me? Is that why? I gotta read it myself!"

Chell shook her head. With a polite smile, she pointed to the kid, to the book, and then to herself with a nod.

"So you wanna read it?"

She pointed to him, then to herself.

"You want me to read it to you?"

She nodded.

"But you're a grown-up! Grown-ups don't get stories read to them. You can already read them!"

She shook her head.

"Yeah, you can!"

A slightly more aggressive head-shake.

"You _can't?_ Come on, you're being silly."

Yet another head-shake. Her polite smile was gone.

"Okay, I can read to you. But I'm not starting from the beginning." He patted the space next to him a mere inch away from where Chell was already sitting. She scooted into position and paid close attention as the child not only spoke louder, but pointed to the words as he read each one like his parents did when reading to him.

It took nearly ten minutes to finish a page but Chell never got bored. Whenever he took too long to sound something out, she'd study the pretty pictures. Drawings of weird animals, mostly. Some kind of bird. A human male with a big red house full of black-and-white mammals. Some fat pink things. She wondered where all of these species lived; there hadn't been any in town, nor in the field.

Every letter had two versions of itself, she deduced: the sentence-and-important-name-starting version and the normal version. Some letters could combine into new sounds like _Th_ e and _Ch_ icken and _Sh_ eep. The rest was easy.

The kid made sure to exaggerate his "The end!" when he'd finally finished the book. He set it down and asked Chell in the most genuinely bothered tone possible for a five-year-old, "Do you get it _now?"_ She nodded and nuzzled him in brief thanks.

Back to her private table, she picked up the alphabet book that she had been struggling with and flipped it open to the first page. " _A is for apple."_

That was easier than expected.

Pride welled up in her chest. She finished the book in minutes and moved onto the next feverishly, beyond excited to exercise her newfound ability by learning about new things like _balloons_ and _drums_ (although she was mildly disappointed by the abundance of zebras and xylophones).

Before long, she extended her abilities to the colouring pages; Chell flipped one over to its blank backside and snatched a crayon to scribble with, her handwriting a blend of the fonts that she had seen.

"Turret. Lift. Up and down? Cake. One cake. Four cakes." Some words were easier than others, being mixes of known syllables, but others needed to be sounded by individual letter. She struggled with those. "Jonson? Johnsen? Jonsan? Geonsen?"

"GLaDOS" and "Wheatley" she had seen written down before and she copied them, sounded them out in her head once on the paper. THen she wrote other things that she'd seen:

"WARNING: UNSTABLE CHEMICALS INSIDE"

"Neurotoxin Control Center"

"GLaDOS EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN AND CAKE DISPENSARY KEEP UNLOCKED" (Chell snickered at that one; GLaDOS had apparently been stupid enough to think that she could _read_ when she made that door.)

"Aperture Science Innovators"

"Not in cruelty. Not in wrath, The reaper came today;"

Chell stopped with a jolt. She stared at the paper, someone else's handwriting staring back at her. Familiar symbols took on a new meaning. She began frantically scribbling everything that she could recall of his work, craving his messages and desperate to know more about him.

Her enthusiasm for copying his work died somewhere around "aLL i waNt is a Life without PAiN." Her breaths took on a heavy quality, her crayon slowing to a halt. She finished writing the last of what she'd seen of him and re-read it all, slower, with an expression of concern. Chell checked that no one was paying attention to her before wiping her eyes.

He had needed help and she hadn't been there. She hadn't even known.

A thick sigh blew out of her nostrils. There wasn't anything she could do about it now and this wasn't the place to mourn. Chell peered around at the bigger, possibly stronger adults. This wasn't the place to admit _failure,_ either.

Shock and pride in her own achievements canceled each other out. Chell shoved the alphabet books haphazardly into where she assumed they belonged in the shelves and made her way downstairs. The man at the front desk asked, "Are you leaving now? The rain stopped half an hour ago."

Chell nodded with a big, unnerved smile. She pushed her way out the door, trotted home, and curled up with her teddy bears to cry where no one could see her.

Breakfast shopping the next morning took her longer than expected when her usual bee-line for the produce aisle became interrupted by a surge of curiosity. Chell was comfortable enough inside the store (and the automatic doors were fearful enough of her) that her trips were no longer confined to the "get in and get out" mindset that she had initially stuck to. As her fear of the building faded, she became all too aware of the sections yet unexplored.

In addition to less ceiling-induced anxiety than usual, Chell noted as she stared at the overhead signs, she could actually read about the things that she didn't recognize now. So much of the store had been previously inaccessible due to Chell not knowing what any of it was and having no way of asking.

It turned out that most of the food had things written on them anyway so asking wouldn't be necessary. Hell, even the apples had things written on their stickers. " _Lilac Farms™ - Large ORGANIC - made in USA - 8556."_ Whatever that meant.

Much to her disappointment, knowing how to sound out words didn't make her automatically know their meaning. Things like "salsa" and "pizza." What were those? She had to stick her arm into the freezer and read over the back of the box to figure out the latter, which wasn't at all worth it when all it turned out to be was bread and cheese and yet _another_ word she didn't know, pepperoni. So far, this was a waste of time.

Chell started her journey back to the produce section but, not one to give up, kept reading interesting items on the way in case one actually managed to teach her something. One particularly unappetizing slab of cold pink squishiness said, " _Two breasts • 16 oz • Boneless Skinless Chicken-"_

Wait, _chicken?_ Like the bird in the book? Chell's nose scrunched up. Coincidence? Unlikely. She'd seen skin rubbed raw before (her own, after dangerous stunts gone wrong or bullets skidding past) and this looked remarkably similar. The muted, pinkish flesh tone and the implication of removed bone and skin made her stomach twist.

Kill a chicken, fine. But _eating_ it? Putting decaying flesh in your mouth and swallowing it? Chell fought her gag reflex, setting down the package. She glanced down the aisle at the array of different cuts and fellow humans actually taking interest in them.

If chicken were edible, that meant non-plant organic matter was edible. That meant that _she_ was edible.

Not that Chell believed anyone was going to try to eat her anytime soon. Not alive, at least; death in general still concerned her more than being dinner. Yet the mere concept that she _could_ be eaten was new and revolting. All through picking and purchasing selected fruit, she was trying very, very hard not to imagine birds picking at her post-mortem. It was one of the first times that she had ever stopped to think about a post-self world and what would happen to her body after death. The first time that she had considered anything happening after her while she decayed.

That in and of itself was disturbing, cannibalism notwithstanding.


	8. Safety Measures

"' _Animals don't behave like men,' he said. 'If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill."'_

 **\- Richard Adams,** _ **Watership Down**_

ººººº

Despite everything, orange was still her favorite color. It may have been a prominent one in Aperture, the color of her jumpsuit and half of the portals, but she loved it. It had always been there for her, the one bright, exuberant tone against every other dull, mechanical shade in the lab. Even in its brightest form, blue felt too native to her. Too scientific. Too clean.

Yet orange was the color of fire. It was the color of vibrancy and wilderness. It was alive, tireless, and through its energy came a taste of nostalgia.

Chell found herself spending the end of September in her corner of the park or on the benches with her head tilted back to watch the leaves turn orange. Visibly mesmerized, lost in the natural cycle of the environment. In awe that change was this mundane of a reality out here.

Parents weren't so worried about her anymore as she had been living in the park long enough for them to recognize her. She avoided the sand and was nice to the kids. They were slowly learning to overlook her oddities; the captivated stare that she liked to give the trees would have been a lot more worrying had she been newer to the area. None of them exactly wanted to get to know her but none had called the police yet, either.

In a clockwork environment, change is dangerous. Anything not according to plan means that everything is falling apart. Against all inclination to panic at the possibility that something was _very wrong with these trees,_ all it took for Chell to realize that this was normal was to observe those around her.

People seemed to be happy that this was happening, if not completely nonchalant. The kids loved crushing leaves and their parents had no problem with it. Passers-by made comments about the beauty of the season and - in spite of her Aperture-raised instincts to reject change - Chell agreed.

She didn't like the nip in the air, though. It was nothing compared to how cold Aperture was but it annoyed her after getting so used to summer. She didn't like that nights came sooner, either; the earlier it got dark, the earlier her friends went home. The earlier she was left alone.

The night sky had become an increasingly disturbing sight over the last few dusks. Once the sun had finished setting and left the stars untinted, she could clearly see that the moon had returned to full. As welcoming as infinity was against the memory of close, white ceilings and glass walls, that moon unnerved her. Staring at it too long brought his begging and the tight squeeze of her lungs close to bursting back into her mind. More than once, she'd wound up shaking on her side, feeling his handle in her palm again and letting it go.

Pretty leaves and stars and the wall-less park could only do so much. When she did manage to fall asleep, nightmares plagued her in higher numbers than usual. Her makeshift mattress of blankets became torn on one end from her boot braces slicing when she kicked. Her teddy bears had bites in their ears and foreheads.

Sleeping during the day wasn't an option. Most stores were closed at night and the humans were all asleep. Forced to pick between social interaction and mental security, she chose the former without question. What was the point of escaping if she couldn't make friends?

Besides, it wasn't safe to sleep with so many guests in her park. Being asleep was being defenseless. In unconsciousness, she couldn't protect herself. If anyone found her hiding space while she was sleeping, they could very easily kill her.

So she took to wandering. After each nightmare, she would stand up and go on long walks through the town. Sometimes learning her way around farther ends of the town that she usually didn't feel the need to explore. Sometimes returning to the residential district and counting how many people had their lights on. Sometimes toying around with things that made her curious or frustrated, like the traffic lights. She had been right about those, by the way: there was a delay on the button.

To her relief, people hadn't been noticing her exhaustion. Chell assumed they were aware of her new nightly habits and their failure to pick up on stifled yawns was success on her part. It couldn't just be that they were used to her acting "crazy" and had stopped trying to make sense of her or anything. Of course not.

One recent rule of the park, only whispered about between parents from the safety of their lawns and PTA meeting rooms, was to keep their kids on the sand. No matter how close the Lady got to the sandpit, she wouldn't enter it. She may like to sit nearby and watch the kids play but never you mind, she won't go into the sand. Theories on _why_ always disappeared as soon as everyone collectively realized that they didn't care.

Yet even this mutual nod of a law began to subside as Chell spent less and less time watching the children play. It was dangerous to get too close to them while tired; they or their parents could see her rub her eyes and consider it an opportunity to attack. These people were her guests, her friends, and though she firmly believed them doomed to betray her at one point or another, she didn't want to bring on a battle any sooner than one had to occur.

Instead, Chell spent some of her time exploring a particular type of building that she hadn't figured out yet. They were usually the cleanest and the loudest, a sort of hybrid between grocery stores and those places that sold pre-cooked meals with tables that people could choose to eat at. These places, too, had tables where people ate, but no immediately visible cashier. Usually when she tried to explore and find one, she was ushered out after a few minutes of confused meandering. She'd never gotten enough time to put together how the places worked.

Chell was never one to give up but she _was_ one to get distracted. While being politely kicked out of a restaurant one day, she realized that she now had the ability to ask about such places. All she needed was paper and something to write with. Originally, she planned to steal from the Children's section of the library, but she didn't want to make the kids sad that their crayons were gone. Besides, the papers up there were all coloring pages; only one side was blank enough to write full sentences on.

What kind of store sold paper? Quite a few of the mixed shops had empty books, which seemed like a better alternative to loose papers. Plus, a lot of them were small enough to fit into her oversized and ever-abundant pockets. To her luck, the same stores carried pens and markers in a variety of colors. Chell ended up blowing that day's food money on communication tools and completely forgot about investigating the restaurants.

It wasn't like she was going to starve or anything. Apples and oranges needed to be eaten the day of purchase but pastries could go a week before they went stale. On top of those, Chell's diet had a new staple. The the deity of top tier foods, cheap, able to go weeks without rotting, and the box was covered of beautiful colors: Lucky Charms cereal.

It wasn't her _favorite_ food but it was always there when she needed it. And as long as she had a few boxes stuffed in her trees, she could spend all the money she wanted on rainbow glitter pens.

Now she just needed somebody to talk to.

The kids in her park had all but abandoned the sandpit. The last four days she had left in the morning and didn't return until the evening. Plenty of time for them to forget the threat of a looming stranger and break free from their parents. They were such tiny things, stupid and weak. If they tried to take her down she could easily kill one. Safe _and_ cute, the complete package.

Chell singled one out - a young boy whose parents had three other rugrats to deal with and couldn't be bothered to keep a constant eye on him. He had a haircut that made Chell wonder how he was able to see through those bangs and no skill at climbing trees. Poor thing couldn't pull himself up the first branch. Naturally, she wanted to help.

Her notepad and pens pocketed securely, she climbed up a branch above him and offered her hand. His attempt to take it nearly ended with him on the ground, so she pulled him up by both wrists instead until his feet could touch the lowest branch. He handled himself from there. Every time he made it to the branch Chell was on, she climbed a little bit higher until she was close to the top and stopped.

"Thanks," he said, a little out of breath, "You're cool."

She'd heard that word a few times before. "Cool." It meant, as far as she understood, helpful when describing a person or acceptable when describing a situation. Chell smiled and thanked him with a nod, patted the spot next to her until he sat on it.

"You're the lady who lives here, right? Is it weird to live in a park?"

Sort of. She shrugged and took out her notepad for a more complex answer. The kid's eyes went wide for a moment when he saw, upset that he would have to dedicate time to reading outside of school. Thankfully, her note wasn't as hard as the books his English teachers assigned: "Little strange but good strange. I like the weirdness usually."

Elation bubbled up in her chest as he began to sound out her message. Words that she came up with and communicated were in the process of being _understood._

"Yeah?" His legs swung restlessly underneath him. Chell kept an eye on them. Without Long Fall boots, a loss of balance could mean injury or even death. "Would you ever live in a house if you like the park so much?"

She tried out a different color for this one. "No. I don't like walls and ceilings."

"What do you do when it rains?"

"Library."

"You go in the library?"

She nodded.

The kid looked down from her paper at the grass below, obscured in part by leaves and sharp twigs. His stomach twisted with a sudden fear of heights that manifested as an anxious twitch. Chell scooted a bit closer to him, a nonverbal reassurance that she would catch him if he fell.

He visibly relaxed. "So didja ever go to school? Mom said that people have to live in parks because they didn't go to school."

"What is skool?"

"No, it's-" He reached for her pen and she flinched away, an instinctive response to sudden movement. Under the belief that this was another grown-up "say please" lesson, the boy pointed to it and asked politely. She gave him a different pen instead, the light blue one that she was planning on throwing out anyway.

"It's spelled like this," followed by the word "School." Chell sounded it out in her head and wrote underneath, "Thank you. What is school?"

"You go do it every day to learn things. Like how to read!"

"I taught myself to read." (That GH didn't make any sense but she'd seen it before. The kid didn't mind it when he read so it must have been correct.) "No, I don't go to school."

"Well, good, it's not fun."

"Why not?"

"It's just boring!"

"Could I go to school for you?"

"No! You have to be a kid to go to school. Plus, I don't wanna miss it and have to live in a park. Parks don't have TVs or microwaves."

"What are those?"

The kid's eyes widened, his legs slowing their wild swinging. "You've never watched TV? They've got cartoons on them and even talk-y shows for grown-ups."

"I have not heard of those things."

"They're awesome!" Another word that Chell had picked up a loose definition for. "You watch them on the TV. They tell stories with actors and go on adventures that you watch."

Chell was having a hard time picturing what he was talking about. A visual medium through which stories about adventure are told by people called actors. She pictured something similar to read-alouds, someone telling children stories over a radio infused with a monitor.

"And, um," The boy glanced at her paper to remind himself what they were talking about. "And… Oh, microwaves are how you get food."

"I have food."

"Yeah! They're not the _only_ way to get food." He rolled his eyes and didn't say anything else. Chell had hardly a page full, not enough for a satisfying conversation, but she was losing his attention.

Quick, what gets people's attention? "Do you want some?"

"Some _what?"_

"Food. I have candy and apples and breads."

"Um, sure. Where is it, though? Do you have a fridge?"

Worried that she would lose him again if she wasted time to ask what a fridge was, Chell pocketed her notepad and pens to pick him up in both arms. Then leapt from the tree and landed in the dirt unharmed. He half-shrieked most of the way down, her fluffy sweater clutched in his fists and his eyes shut until he realized they were both unharmed. "How did you jump off a tree!?"

She didn't answer until they were in her makeshift bedroom a few moments later, when she set him down and tapped one of her boots. Though at that point he was more distracted by the dozens of half-destroyed thrift store teddy bears that masqueraded as a collective pillow. He reached out to touch one with half a mind that it would bite him.

It didn't. Chell pulled some of her food down from the branches of a nearby tree as well as a plastic plate with a chip in the side. The boy ripped his hand away from the pile when she moved to sit across from him as if she hadn't already seen him touching her things.

She set the plate in front of him and poured out a few handfuls of Lucky Charms, garnishing it with a lollipop the same way one garnishes a fine dessert with a cherry. The child wasn't impressed but his wide-eyed confusion was easily misinterpreted. "Um… Thanks." As to be expected, he took the lollipop and left the breakfast cereal untouched. Which was fine. More for her.

She picked the marshmallows out and ate those first. The boy asked, "Why is your bed all scratched?"

Chell tapped her boots again, particularly the braces.

"Do those hurt to wear?"

She shook her head. They weren't even that heavy. Their weighted autobalance system was designed not to inconvenience the wearer, making them light to anyone wearing them despite the powerful density.

"That's good…" He was fiddling with the wrapper that was still around his lollipop, his mother's warning against taking candy from strangers only just now coming back into his mind. He didn't distrust Chell but his mom would be mad if she saw him breaking a rule.

Speaking of whom, the boy's "falling out of a tree" cries had attracted less wanted guests. With a desperate call for someone named "Brody," a baggy-eyed woman cradling a two-year-old stumbled into the clearing. Upon the sight of him, she nearly dropped her youngest child to hug her oldest.

Chell shot to her feet and the boy dropped his lollipop. He wrapped an awkward hug around his mother as she knelt down to grab him, muttering his name again under her breath. "Where _were_ you!? Why did you shout?"

"I just climbed a tree! And, um. This lady helped me get down but she jumped and I thought she was gonna break her legs."

"You're not hurt!?"

"No!"

The mother stood, looked Chell up and down. Chell, too, sized her up. Small, frail stature. Breakable. Couldn't use her arms while holding a toddler. Chell's fists curled, shoulders tense, ready to defend herself if the woman attacked. Her face, however, stayed soft, worried. She didn't want to fight. This kid was her friend.

"She's nice, mom," Brody assured, arms around his mom's leg. "She's weird but she's really nice."

The mother continued to stare her down and it clicked in Chell's mind: she thought her child had been stolen.

Chell raised her palms immediately, all anger in her stance replaced with as much sympathy as she knew how to express. As predicted, the mother backed off. She sighed and ushered her son out of the clearing, a begrudging "thank you" mouthed in Chell's direction for not torturing her child while she was away.

Chell nodded but the mother couldn't see it. They were already out of sight.

She sat back down and ate the rest of the cereal by herself. The lollipop, too.

 _Her throat and her spine burned, the stinging taste of rusted water in the back of her mouth from the puddle she'd found herself in and the sharp ringing in her ears drowned out her senses. The murky, muddy sights came next, horizon blocked by crumpled bridges and signs and rooms collapsed around her. Another mechanical graveyard. As she pushed herself up she could have sworn she heard a turret singing but the words didn't make any sense. She panted, inhaled the smoke of nearby bonfires, and worked to gather her scattered thoughts. Recall where she'd been. What had happened._

 _What_ _ **had**_ _happened?_

Chell's teeth dug into her teddy bear, a strained, painful whimper forcing its way out of her throat as she remembered and it all came back.

" _Now who's the boss...? Who's the boss?"_

Her eyes shot open, legs striking the blankets uselessly and driving another slice through them. Nearly six whole minutes passed before she realized where she was and what she was holding. Her poor teddy bear had gotten a hole in his side from that one, her mortified squeezing too much for its fragile seams. It may have been inanimate but she nuzzled it in apology anyway in the hopes that pretending it was a person would help her feel better.

She dropped it when she stood up and glanced at the sky against better judgement. The moon was a few ticks down from full. Chell bared her teeth at it.

The streets were never completely empty. Someone was always awake, cruising sleepily through the streets in their car or visible in the windows of lonely 24/7 stores. Sometimes people walked past and she watched them out of the corner of her eye, paranoid that they knew how vulnerable she had been minutes before.

She hissed at a van as it skidded past and took a sharp turn into a wide alleyway to avoid it. Tiny lights underneath the awning of the building on her right illuminated patches of the concrete and nothing else, skewed semi-lighting making it hard for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. The other side of the alley was mostly dumpsters and cardboard boxes.

Movement caught her eye as did the faint sound of tired struggling. Her attention whipped to the source, a half-lit figure resting in a pile of boxes and not quite able to stand. He was holding something that glinted like glass so Chell kept her distance. She stepped away from the light and squinted to see him.

He was holding a bottle, it turned out. His head lulled between upright and hanging, an inconsistent effort to stay awake that made him bob, and his dull eyes had difficulty focusing. Once again, he tried to stand up and found himself trapped by the damp, half-rotted cardboard that he had made his chair.

He didn't look dangerous. If anything, he looked helpless. Chell took a few steps closer before he actually noticed her and garbled, "Hey. Uh…" He squinted in the dark, gaze dropping temporarily to her chest to decipher which title he should use with this silhouetted stranger. "Lady… Hey, look." Another attempt to stand. He got a bit farther this time, managing to swing one foot into position before it fell out in front of him again. "Can I use… Can I use your phone?"

She had no idea what that meant. Questions could wait until he was standing, though. Chell came within reaching distance and began prying the bottle - a potential weapon - out of the man's hand. He ripped it away from her and dropped it on his lap. Chell flinched, hissed at him, and dared closing in a few more inches to kick it off of his lap.

"What the _fuck?"_ He leaned back, bending the cardboard until he felt a wall behind him and clamored up with it. "Lady, I need your _phone._ You know, your… Look, lady, my- My girlfriend's gonna be mad if I drive home. Just call a taxi for me, just… Please, pretty please?"

She seemed to be finally listening when her hand slid into her pocket only to pull out a notepad instead of a cell phone. As far as he knew, taxis didn't usually answer to those. Even worse was when she started writing on it instead of paying attention to him.

He grabbed the notepad and tried to pull it out of her hands only to have it ripped out of his with another hiss. Chell's teeth stayed bared this time, shoulders up, a silent warning not to come anywhere near her.

"I need to call on a phone, lady, I can't talk to a car with a piece of goddamn paper. I lost mine so you need to stop being a _bitch_ and gimme yours or Stacy's gonna be p-pissed."

She finished writing and turned her note around for him to read ("What is a phone?") but he didn't pay it any mind, pushed himself off the wall and stumbled closer half a step or so. Chell growled and put the notepad and pen away, her attention now fully on defending herself.

"Fuck it," the man slurred as he reached for Chell's pockets, "I'll just get-"

Her boot hit his chest like lightning.

The only sounds were a harsh thud against the concrete wall, a sickening crunch, and the muffled choking of a man whose lungs had been pierced by his own shattered ribs. He sputtered, aware of pain but not much else. The foot pinning him to the wall left and he fell forward, sputtering and gasping for air. It came down again on the back of his neck. A clean end to his suffering.

Chell continued down the alley with no concern for the body. She left it behind with no shift in gait, no twist in her stomach. Her expression hadn't changed. Murder was normal. It was the only sane response to violence.

If anything, she was calmer than before. Satisfied that human targets weren't any more difficult than mechanical ones.


	9. Insecurity

"He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature."  
 **\- Madeline Miller,** _ **The Song of Achilles**_

ººººº

There was something unsettling about someone introducing themselves in perfect Times New Roman. The librarian leaned as far back as her swivel chair would go, the backend resting at an angle against the curve of her desk, and her fingers white-knuckled around both armrests. The note currently being shoved in her face was hand-written; it had been drawn up right in front of her, a blank paper now suddenly filled with typewriter-esque calligraphy from someone who had been illiterate just last week.

"Hello! I'm Chell."

The librarian read over the note at least eighteen times, words only registering after eleven or so. A bite to her lip was proof enough to Chell that she was finished reading and the paper finally pulled back, giving the poor librarian some breathing room. She took it with exaggerated gratitude in the form of a hefty exhale and a loss of tension in her forearms. Such relief was short-lived; Chell had begun writing again.

This time she held it out at a reasonable distance. "You never told me your name."

The librarian's skin prickled all over, including over her tongue which now felt too big for her mouth. Chell was right, they'd never been formally introduced, which struck her as strange even if she couldn't place why. The librarian hardly thought of the two of them as friends; if anything, Chell held her hostage every time she showed up. Yet it seemed rude to be taken hostage by someone who doesn't know your name.

On the other hand was the matter of being identifiable. Opening herself up to be asked about. Hiding from someone who knew you by name was close to impossible.

"Da- um." The librarian closed her mouth as soon as she opened it. Her fingers made a brief grabby motion for Chell's pen before she spotted her own on the desk and took that up instead, alongside scrap paper which wouldn't waste any of Chell's journal.

She considered it a gift to a previously illiterate friend, writing down her rather unusual name instead of saying it and expecting her to sound it out later, but it was also a bit of a test. She wanted to see if Chell could finish reading it in her head before she herself could say it out loud.

"Daphne." The librarian's handwriting was squashed and straight and hard-pressed into the paper. It didn't want to be seen.

Chell's nose scrunched up and Daphne fiddled with her pen. Chell knew the versatility of H well - it played a role in her own name - but that particular combination was lost on her. Instead of looking to Daphne for answers, though, she kept staring at it like she was trying to make sense of a mathematical equation. Which she was.

Daphne murmured it, catching Chell's attention, which prompted her to say it again but a little louder. Chell cocked an eyebrow. She had been expecting the E to be silent.

Alright, then. "Hello Daphne."

Pass one test, fail another. Daphne recoiled as she watched Chell write, the immaculate nature of her penmanship taking on a smaller, heavier texture, a blend of her previous computer font and Daphne's own. She was reminded of the last time she watched _The Thing._

Chell had been anticipating a joyful response. This was a triumph, the ability to communicate brand new and exciting. Why wasn't her friend excited? Her smile faded, becoming blank and her tongue swiping her lip and she switched into analysis mode, manually constructing pieces of Daphne's expression in an attempt to learn what was wrong and, if she could, help. She caught the shiver that ran down the librarian's spine but made no connection between it and the sudden loss of emotion on her own face.

Wait, she could just ask! "What's wrong?"

"Nothing!" Too fast of a response, not sincere enough to satisfy Chell. She underlined her sentence. " _What's wrong?"_

Lying wasn't going to work, was it? Daphne resorted to her initial concern, the one that started up when Chell had walked in with a pen and paper to begin with. "Y-you just… You learned so _fast._ Most people… Most adults just learning to read, it takes them years."

Chell's shoulders stiffened in a moment of polite shock followed by a head-tilt and a rise of both eyebrows like they were talking about odd weather patterns or their favorite china sets. "Really? Was easy for me. Read books with pictures like you said. Kids helped little bit. You did too and thank you."

"Mmm-hmmmm…" It came out more as a whine than a word, the thin-lipped internal screech of a woman who very desperately wanted to be elsewhere - or at least with a less mysteriously unpredictable partner. The mix of absorbed handwriting, unflowing grammar, and how nonchalantly Chell brushed off teaching herself to read in under a week brought up questions that Daphne felt should be buried rather than asked. Likely, the answers would only make matters worse. She couldn't even begin to speculate what this woman was or why she was so insistent on stalking a poor librarian who wanted nothing to do with her.

Yet at the end of the slowly-read note, Daphne shifted uncomfortably for a totally different reason. The probity of Chell's "thank you" alongside the smile she presented it with seemed too human to have been written by the alien beast that she was sitting across from. It was confusing.

She settled for the most tender "You're welcome" that her lungs could force out. It sounded hardly as intended. Her heart was beating too fast to be warm at the moment. Even so, it was enough for Chell, who didn't want to strain her apparently jumpy friend.

Underneath gratitude and social desperation were violent instincts turned protective, the back of her mind twitching with an urge to kill whatever was worrying Daphne so much. It couldn't simply be mild surprise at a new skill. Chell hovered the pen over her journal but didn't make any new letters. She could push the subject later, when her friend had calmed down.

As long as she wasn't in any immediate danger. Chell shot a sidelong glance towards the computers. Daphne seemed to know how to deal with them but Chell didn't rule them out. Just in case.

Conversation didn't last much longer. Daphne caught an unsettling view of the cover of Chell's journal as she closed it: carnation pink with a pattern of tiny white birds and red ribbons. Was this lady even real?

Evidently, she was. And she was clinging to her again on their routine trip around the bookcases and past the evil computer lab.

Chell's improved eating habits (read: lack of starvation) had given her some semblance of muscle mass, tangible under her sleeves and more than apparent in her iron grip. But being in the arms of someone who could throw her across the room like a ragdoll, shockingly, wasn't Daphne's main issue. It was the stranger's mind that terrified her. Mercurial and inconsistent. Who knew what Chell was thinking about at any given time?

Right now, she was thinking about buying some cupcakes.

Chell always found it odd that stores sold individual cakes but not individual cupcakes. Purchasing warmer clothes for the increasingly cold weather had left her without enough to get an entire pack. She'd thought that she could find individual cupcakes for a cheaper price, as seemed to be the logic of stores - less items, cheaper expense - but not a single location offered that.

On the way out, she smuggled an apple into her pocket out of spite.

All in all, she knew of maybe eight stores total that she could afford to buy from and four of them sold primarily food. The last one on her list also failed to deliver in the cupcake department but Chell refused to leave without spending her measly earnings on _something_ edible.

Time for exploration. With it, careful reading. Plenty of packaged meals had hidden corpse ingredients which she was slowly learning to spot and avoid. Her search morphed into intrigue the deeper she wandered into the store, each new item snatching her attention away from the last. It wasn't so much the objects themselves that interested her; it was the fact they were new.

That is, until she wandered down an unfamiliar isle.

October had hit the market hard and this store was a proud front-runner, displaying candy in gorgeous orange and purple bags already marked down to an affordable price.

She had the perfect amount of money, able to afford the limit of what her deep pockets could hold and not a single piece more. The strange choice of decor did catch her eye but it was nothing worth noting for the moment. Chell was too comfortable with the smell of cheap sugar to be unnerved by some paper mâché skeletons and...soft, cloud-like spiderwebs that she may or may not have stolen a chunk of.

Commotion caught her attention on the way home. People were gathered at the bottleneck of a familiar alleyway, individually frightened but with a collective mob mentality of morbid curiosity and high energy that Chell found herself drawn to. She'd spent a decent part of last night in that same alley; it seemed inconspicuous at the time, aside from the dangerous stranger lurking inside...but he was gone. What was left to be afraid of?

In part, her push into the whispering crowd was an excuse to press against human bodies and share their warmth. It was a sorry replacement for real attention but enough to stave off hunger until her next library visit. People didn't want to give up their front-row seats and stubbornness seemed to be the only thing that could break their staunch desire for personal space.

The dead body was nothing new. Her attention went to the people nosing around it, decked out in identical uniforms and carrying weapons in their belts. Was this the dangerous thing? Was this what people were flocking to worry over?

One quick scope of the surrounding individuals had Chell rating herself as the strongest, bravest, and therefor in the best position to play guardian. She shoved her way through the crowd, ducked under the yellow tape, and stood proud between innocent bystanders and the uniformed fleet. She had their attention instantly.

They gave an unspoken glance-around, picking apart who would have to talk down this Meddlesome Marsha. One of them, a stubby-legged man with unthreatening features, drew the shortest straw. His approach caught Chell's eye before she had a chance to finish sizing everyone up and deciding the order they would die in.

Chell bared her teeth, fists clenched. Striking first put her at a slight disadvantage; it was smarter to counter and hit immediately afterward, taking away your opponent's first shot and therefore wasting their energy in the process of avoiding damage. Specifically, she was waiting for him to take out one of his weapons so that she could steal it.

The officer, alternatively, had a faint idea of who he was dealing with. He had a daughter who liked swing-sets and a wife with too much faith in humanity.

"Ma'am…" His voice was a steel butterfly, wispy and wimpy with the added undertones of authority that came with his uniform. A hiss passed through Chell's teeth. She didn't like him one bit. "Do you need something?"

No response. One of her fists loosened for a split second with the intention of grabbing her notepad, but the memory of her last fight came back. She couldn't distract herself and risk getting grabbed again. Her scrunched nose twitched. The officer made a mental note to warn the Missus about this.

He went on, "This is a crime scene. You have to...stay behind the yellow line. Do you understand, ma'am?"

Chell blinked for the first time in minutes. She didn't understand, actually. Her gaze darted from him to the anxious people behind her - unaware that their muttering had turned against her - just long enough to qualify as communication. The officer went silent, temporarily believing this to be a mere twitch from the madwoman until he realized that she was waiting for an answer. _Why are they so nervous?_

"Someone _died_ here, ma'am." Maybe that was a little too harsh. This unfortunate, probably demented lady didn't need to be hearing about murder. "We're trying to...find who did it. We're going to catch them, understand? So that...they can't...kill anyone else." He winced as he spoke. Still too dark, but he had no other way to put it.

Wait, _they didn't know it was her?_ Chell's lips closed around her teeth and an expression of unnerved inquisition came over her face. It wasn't a secret that she had killed someone. She was a killer by nature! With a body count that, when counting AI (because why wouldn't you?), rivalled GLaDOS's!

Yet by the reticent uncertainty in his tone and the subtle threat of execution for the murderer, Chell wasn't so inclined to correct him. This was the clean-up crew, then. The military. Turrets in blue suits. It was their job to regulate. Killing them in view of witnesses would be counterproductive.

Test chambers themselves, as in the physical constructs in Aperture's depths, were gone, but Chell had spent her life in them. Like a small-time farmer in a busy city, she subconsciously only had her native culture to go off of. Everything functioned like a test chamber or it didn't make sense. Every action had a goal, every goal had a solution. Every so often there would be a change in rules like the introduction of lasers, hard light bridges, or not touching people until given permission. But the basic premise was always the same: win.

Death was not winning. Death was failure. Here was a new rule for the books: _murders must be secret._ Chell wrote it in her mind and instantly a hundred ways to hide or otherwise dispose of bodies came to her. This wouldn't be difficult.

The officer watched her slowly come out of her aggressive poise and into one of emotionless thought, his eyes following her tongue every time it ran over her lip. Another officer, sharp-voiced and female, intervened with a speedy approach and a shameless shooing gesture. Chell hissed in polite declaration of mutual enemyship and ducked under the yellow tape, not so much vanishing into the crowd as getting swallowed by it.

It was quiet now and all of the herd's collaborative interest in the macabre settled stodgily onto her. Very few people wanted to be her friend after that.


End file.
